I recently joined some Flickr groups and posted some messages with direct links to my images on Smugmug. Others in the group said they can't see the images. Sure enough, when I fire up IE and try to link to the Smugmug images from the Flickr page, IE says "web page not found."

I had no problem using Firefox earlier, but then I "cleared private data" in Firefox and tried again. Same thing, kind of. Firefox would not display 3 of 4 images, just a blank page. One image did display.

And then more mystery - in both IE and Firefox I hit refresh. Sometimes that worked, sometimes it took 4 to 5 refresh clicks. Once in IE it took 12 clicks on refresh. Of course, once the image displays it's in the cache and displays faithfully from then on. But clear the cache and history and the problem returns.

I've got many direct links to Smugmug images in messages in forums other than Flickr (dpreview, miranda) and no one has comlained they can't see the images.

I searched dgrin and found a few references, but nothing exactly like this and nothing relative to Flickr.

Anybody know what's going on and if there is a workaround?

Here is the Flickr page currently giving problems. Scroll down to the post my Redcrown with links to 4 images.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/iowa/di...7619744116128/

Are external links enabled in that gallery?

Redcrown, you have external links off for that gallery. Turn those on in tools>customize gallery so that your photo will show up in Flickr forums, and anywhere else on the internet.

Thanks, "external links" appears to be the solution. Links were to old galleries made before I learned how to set and apply a master profile when creating new galleries. Everything I created since 2007 has external links enabled, so I didn't think to check that. Sorry.

Still seems a mystery why IE can successfylly link to a Smugmug image in a gallery with external links disabled -- if you hit the refresh button enough times.

Originally Posted by redcrown Thanks, "external links" appears to be the solution. Links were to old galleries made before I learned how to set and apply a master profile when creating new galleries. Everything I created since 2007 has external links enabled, so I didn't think to check that. Sorry. Still seems a mystery why IE can successfylly link to a Smugmug image in a gallery with external links disabled -- if you hit the refresh button enough times.

In your own browser when you've viewed an image in the actual Smugmug gallery, it is possible that an image can get loaded from your browser cache and appear to work in an external posting, even though it won't actually work for most people.