Guide to third party storage
External Images allows you to host your images pretty much anywhere instead of using your main web server. The most common methods are to store images on another server you own or to source them from affiliate CDNs (for example via Datafeedr feeds), but you can also store images on a number of other third party services. Below, are the results of testing these services with External Images.
For a production site the tidiest setup is your own image subdomain such as images.yourdomain.com with a CDN (Cloudflare, BunnyCDN, KeyCDN) in front to resize on the fly. The consumer services below are fine for a handful of images or for testing, but they are not built for serving a shop’s worth of product images.
- Google Drive – against Google’s terms for web hosting; images can be pulled without warning.
- OneDrive – neither the new-tab nor the embed method served a working image in testing.
Google Drive
Google is not a fan of you using their Drive product for images presented on the web, so be careful of doing this – if they find out then your images may become inaccessible. They have some more information about that in their terms of service here:
https://developers.google.com/drive/terms
[](https://www.superspeedyplugins.com/assets/googleEI-1-4.png)
Nonetheless, here is a quick guide to setting that up. Go to your images in Google Drive and right click on your desired image, then select ‘Get link’. Then make sure ‘Anyone with link’ is selected and copy the link.
[](https://www.superspeedyplugins.com/assets/external-8-1-4.png) [](https://www.superspeedyplugins.com/assets/external-9-1-4.png)
Paste the link into a new tab and grab the part after d/ and before /view.
[](https://www.superspeedyplugins.com/assets/external-10-1-4.png)
In another new tab open this link:
https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=
Paste the previous copy behind the url:
[](https://www.superspeedyplugins.com/assets/external-12-1-4.png)
Now, copy this whole link, add it to the External Images Gallery, and hit preview.
[](https://www.superspeedyplugins.com/assets/external-13-1-4.png)
Dropbox
Dropbox doesn’t have the same issue as Google with hosting your images, but it’s still a few steps to get it done. Open your image on Dropbox.com and hit the ‘Share’ button on the right of the image. Make sure the setting is set to ‘Anyone with this link can view’ and then create and copy link.
[](https://www.superspeedyplugins.com/assets/external-14-1-4.png) [](https://www.superspeedyplugins.com/assets/external-15-1-4.png) [](https://www.superspeedyplugins.com/assets/external-16-1-4.png)
Paste the link into a new tab and at the end of the URL change the ‘0’ to ‘1’.
[](https://www.superspeedyplugins.com/assets/external-18-1-4.png)
[](https://www.superspeedyplugins.com/assets/external-19-1-4.png)
Then copy this URL and add it to the External Images Gallery
[](https://www.superspeedyplugins.com/assets/external-20-1-4.png)
Imgur
This one worked the best for me. It’s quick, and it’s guaranteed you will be able to access your images. Go to your Imgur images and right click on your image of choice, open in a new tab. Copy the URL, add that to External Images Gallery, and hit preview. Quick and easy.
[](https://www.superspeedyplugins.com/assets/external-21-1-4.png) [](https://www.superspeedyplugins.com/assets/external-22-1-4.png)
[](https://www.superspeedyplugins.com/assets/external-23-1-4.png)
OneDrive
I took two different approaches to OneDrive; opening the image in a new tab, and embedding the image. Neither of these worked.
Uploading Images
In OneDrive files, click upload > Files. Select Images.
[](https://www.superspeedyplugins.com/assets/VGTZ0tVsVd-1-4.png)
Open image in new tab
First, select an image. Right click the image and click ‘Open image in new tab’.[](https://www.superspeedyplugins.com/assets/Ot0KG0ub1f-1-4.png)
This should open up a new tab, as it says. But it just downloads the image again, so that isn’t what I’m looking for,
Embedding the image
To embed the image, select your image in OneDrive and click on Embed.
[](https://www.superspeedyplugins.com/assets/Embed-image-1-4.png)
Now, generate and copy the URL.
[](https://www.superspeedyplugins.com/assets/generateURL-1-4.png) [](https://www.superspeedyplugins.com/assets/copyURL-1-4.png)
Finally, go to add the image to your property page by adding the URL in the External Images Gallery [](https://www.superspeedyplugins.com/assets/addurl-1-4.png)
The image appears in the preview but will not appear on the website, so that’s unfortunate.
Of the consumer services tested, Imgur was the most reliable: right-click the image, open in a new tab, copy the URL and paste it straight into External Images. Dropbox and Google Drive work with a URL tweak; OneDrive did not work at all.
Hi Dave. Thank for plugin works great. Please how to set images in Rank Math SEO FB and Twitter Sections. As they wont appear. Any solution for that little stuff?
We use WP residence Theme, External Images and Rank Math
Thank you a lot for answer...