Can I get images onto Tumblr without Tumblr hosting them?

March 31, 2015 3:31 AM

IT are blocking images from Tumblr, and when I post them as links to images hosted on our server, Tumblr uploads them and hosts them anyway. Can I get round this?

I've built a blog to be used within my organisation on Tumblr, but our corporate IT blocked it after they decided Tumblr, as a wider site, contained "adult information".

I've got them to unblock the specific blog URL, but all the images are missing. I've tried hosting them on our servers and uploading them via the link, but it seems Tumblr sucks them up and spits them back out as Tumblr URLs anyway. Is there a way of getting round this?

posted by greenish to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

I'm not 100% it will work how you want, but if you go to make a post, click the gear in the upper right corner. In the box there will be the "Text Editor" section, click the arrow next to "Rich Text" and select HTML. Use img src="" as you would normally. I believe that you can flip between rich text and HTML so you don't have to manually insert breaks and stuff but since the more recent tumblr makeover things have been janky. Also, the images will show up on people's dashes as little grey photo boxes they will have to click, but the images will display inline on the actual tumblr's site.
posted by Mizu at 3:44 AM on March 31, 2015

Response by poster: Just gave that a try, but it's just showing up as a broken image, even on a computer that can see the images normally.
posted by greenish at 3:55 AM on March 31, 2015

Best answer: If the images are all on images.tumbler.com or something like that, IT letting that URL should solve your problem. Take a look at the source on a few posts and see of there is a pattern to the URL images.
posted by COD at 5:05 AM on March 31, 2015

Response by poster: Thanks COD, unfortunately they're all hosted at different places - we thought that might be an answer but sadly not.
posted by greenish at 5:39 AM on March 31, 2015

Best answer: You must give the external images a width and height.

<img src="http://www.greenishCompany.com/path/images/companylogo.jpg" width="540" height="810" />

See this about image sizes in tumblr.
posted by royalsong at 6:57 AM on March 31, 2015

Response by poster: You guys are geniuses and I love you.
posted by greenish at 9:50 AM on March 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

The images are all at FOO.media.tumblr.com where FOO is a (from observation) 2 digit number.
posted by Mitheral at 12:22 PM on March 31, 2015