There seems to be a convention here where photos belonging to others are text-linked, not hot-linked.  But I would much rather see the image in Q&As than have to click through links that are critical to understanding the content of a question or answer.

Related discussion (from 3 years ago): https://photo.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/834/should-we-disallow-hot-linking

My impression is that hot-linking in general has become much less problematic and discouraged than it was a few years ago.  For example, I posted this [tag:reverse-engineering] question http://photo.stackexchange.com/q/53211/27832 and the subject photo is in Flickr, which has no problem with hotlinking since they provide a _Share_ URL with every photo.

**Further:** Could the answer to this question, even if merely guidance, be included in http://photo.stackexchange.com/help/asking?