Hi Quanita,
I'm not familiar with the hotlink protection feature you've described, but unfortunately I don't think you'll be able to use that feature on images you want to use in your story maps.
From what I can tell hotlink protection allows you to whitelist certain domains from which you want to allow requests for your images. But when someone accesses a story map you've shared it's their computer (not arcgis.com) that requests the images you've linked to in your story. So adding arcgis.com to your exceptions list won't work. My guess is the reason you can't see the images in the story map builder is that you haven't added your own domain to the exceptions list.
Likewise, your readers won't be able to see the images unless you add their domain to the list. Unless you are making a story for a very specific audience, where you can predict the domains from which they are accessing your story, you'll need to make your images public.
To provide a little more detail, the way a story map works is the reader opens the app and their browser downloads the story map application code and the story data. The story data contains the story's narrative/text, links to media (images, video, maps, etc.), and the structure of how all of this information appears in the story. The reader's browser then requests the media using the links in the story data. A website works in basically the same way, so I believe you'd have this same limitation if you were trying to use protected images in a public website.
Owen
Owen Evans
Lead Product Engineer | StoryMaps
