Is it possible to embed a clickable url in an image? [closed]

Question

Is it in any way possible to add URLs or hyperlinks to photos? It's for adding to a web page. I know there is an image map option. But is it possible using any tool to directly add it to the image?

Answer 1

If I understand the question, you want embedded in your image a clickable URL. ChrisF and Mike have explained how to provide links in HTML, but what you are after is something permanently embedded in your image. Even an image map is an HTML construct that isn't permanently embedded in your image.

Adobe Flash and PDF files can contain clickable URLs if you want to do some work. PDF isn't ideal as it isn't universally accepted, and even Flash isn't available on all platforms.

I think you're best to rely on people see your website URL and typing it in themselves, unless you can ask web masters to link your images back to your site for you.

Answer 2

No, directly adding a clickable link to an image is not possible. That is because this depends on the viewer and viewers will all differ. In the specific case you mention that you want it "for adding to a web page", the answers give ways in using a construct to link image and link together.

One option is to use a watermark: Overlay the link (as text) onto the image. This is the only way to "directly add it to the image" so that it is hard to remove.

Answer 3

If I understand your question properly, you are adding an image to a web page and want to have it jump to another page when clicked?

You would achieve this in a web page using the the anchor, or <a> HTML tag.

Firstly, you would add your photo like this:

<img src="url_to_photo_goes_here" />

Then wrap it in an anchor tag and point that with the href attribute where to link to:

<a href="http://your_target_url_link_here"><img src="url_to_photo" /></a>

The <img> has many more attributes such as height, width, alt, and so on. The <a> tag also has other attributes like target, etc.

You can find out more about these tags here:

• <img> tag
• <a> tag

If you want, as the comment below suggests, an image map, then you use the <map> tag. More information and an example of how to use the <map> tag can be found here...

Answer 4

The metadata that can be stored in a photographic file is metadata about the image as a whole - it's worth considering that much of the metadata requirements have been for publishing workflows, where images would often be cropped, or used in part. As such, none of the current metadata schemes allow for photographs to have different metadata apportioned to different regions - that's a very long-winded way of saying "There is no standard way to embed destination URLs for regions of an image into the metadata".

If you wanted to pursue this idea, then the XMP side-car files are just XML, and as such extensible; but you would require all applications that would edit the photo to understand your extensions and apply changes if the image is cropped or transformed. A simplier option, for your specific use case is to package the image in another format that already supports the specific functionality you require (e.g. Flash, PDF, MHT)

Answer 5

What are you trying to achieve? A URL could be added to image meta data, but you'd need a program to read the data and act on it. I don't know of any browser that would do this.

The standard way is to wrap the image in a hyperlink:

<a href="http://i.stack.imgur.com/U8hdq.jpg" rel="nofollow">
    <img src="http://i.stack.imgur.com/U8hdql.jpg" alt="A row of tanks.">
</a>

If you need the url to be visible on the image then you'll need to use some image editing software (Paint.NET, Photoshop, etc) to add the text.

This method will make the entire image clickable. To make just the text clickable then you'll need to have an image map set up that defines the clickable area to be the same as the extent of the text. There's no way round this.