I've read several articles and Twitter posts recently with conflicting advice and just wondering everyone's experience.

I currently have a large blog with 12+ years of supporting images for posts hotlinked from my Flickr Pro account. Back when I started, using Flickr's CDN made sense and doubled as a backup for my images.

Now I've got much faster hosting and am wondering about the benefits of moving away from Flickr to host images myself. Aside from the obvious Google Images benefits, are there any implications for speed and threading? For instance, if a post has eight images, that's going to be eight more calls to the Wordpress server instead of an external domain.

Thanks for your insight!