Image hosting and SEO

If we do not host images on our site, will it affect SEO ? Please explain the following

1. Using a 3 rd party image host like Imageshack. Will it be considered as bad by Google if we completely depend on them for our images ?

2. Use an image host run by not popular services. Many run their own image host and give better plans than established image hosts. Using them extensively will affect SEO ?

3. What if we use a Google blog post image while giving description of a Google product ? Will it be image / bandwidth stealing ? Explain for other product sites too.


Thanks.

 

having images in your site can give you some SEO benefit. but not having them create SEO problem, don't really sure

 

For example if I host some very essential images like background, logo, header and footer backgrounds, etc. on third party image hosts like photobucket or tinypic, would this diminish my site's reputation in the eyes of the mighty search engines?

Obviously I want to do this to save on bandwidth costs.....

 

As per my opinion using Imageshack is safe but you need to pay regular attention on it.

 

Buddy Google has launched google images and now images can give you really high traffic. you should host your images on your server.