I pit "Photobucket", because somebody has to

I’m not very technophilic and no problem for me if photo’s I embed in posts on web boards are linked to sites that aren’t cool. But paying more than some very nominal amount? I gather it’s a few $100 a year they want. Maybe some people somewhere use Photobucket differently enough for that not to be insane. I occasionally embed images in my posts on special interest boards (various aspects of military history), of primary source documents or pages in non-English language books that aren’t on the web and other posters don’t have, as a courtesy and maybe to show off a little about my research. If there’s no longer a way to do that for free or virtually so, then I just won’t.

But, is there another service to do this for free? I mean just have a place to which I upload images I also store on hard drive (flash drive, CD), no need for it to serve as any kind of backup for me. And just so that image will appear in a post on a regular board (like this but that allows images). No social media aspect needed, and I wouldn’t care about anyone seeing everything I put there.

Imgur.com is free and made for just that. Mostly Reddit people use it, but after you upload an image and click on it, Imgur gives you buttons to copy links directly to the image page on Imgur (“Image Link”), to the image only (“Direct Link”), as a HTML image link, and BBCode (for message boards).

Thanks.

I follow some specialty boards, and now that’s to the PB crap they all look like this:

In case it changes in the future, every image (and it is an image-heavy page) has been replaced with a “please update your account to enable 3rd party hosting” image.

I found that posters on those boards aren’t the best at keeping their photo links valid anyway, so this pretty much means any older threads on boards like that one are now and forever useless.

Just asking Questions wrote: "I found that posters on those boards aren’t the best at keeping their photo links valid anyway, so this pretty much means any older threads on boards like that one are now and forever useless. "

You probably couldn’t update the links anyway because don’t most places have an “edit window” like this board does?

I’m not sure. I see a lot of older threads with pictures that are simply missing, without any placeholders or indication of broken links even. So I don’t know if they can edit, or removed photo links just go dead.

But if people kept their photo links filled, you can see the pictures from threads many years old. But not any more, if they used PB.

I have my own website and post photos there, with essentially Zero restrictions whatsoever. Even when I want to post on Facebook, I put the image on my own website and link to it, thus bypassing most (not all) Facebook mischief. (I’ve never really read the fine print of my hosting contract. They offer me unlimited disk space and almost unlimited bandwidth for just $5 per month !! Think of it – No ads, total control, unlimited disk space, huge bandwidth. I’m spending more than $5 a month just on french fries! (I’m sure the fine print bars me from …)

But five of you could band together, pay $1 per month each, and get your own site for posting images (or anything) with no restrictions. Have some of you pursued something like that already? (No, I’m not looking for partners to help out with my $5/month. :stuck_out_tongue: – I’d offer to help out and post a few images gratis but there’s a fire-wall between the septimus and george identities (we know about each other but he doesn’t know about us :cool: – seriously, if the fire-wall is breached _ _ _ might learn _ _ _ with future powerful search engines.)

$400 ! I just paid that for seven years of my no-holds-barred host. :eek: (Comes with e-mail, tools, domains, etc. I didn’t double-check the number – Maybe it’s $6 or $7/month now, if they’re not running a promotion.)

Bumped because I found another thread I’d saved that had tons of cool photos. Now they’ll be lost (forever lost!) because of the PB crap. Check out this page. There’s ONE active photo there, out of more than a hundred that used to be there.

Even if I’d have thought of it when they were there, it’s a lot of work to download them all. Whoathunk they’d ALL go away?

…and there goes mine now. As mentioned, they even consider cold links to be “third party embedding”.

Motherbucketers.

Mine still seems to be working, but I did view the photo in question on a browser without an ad blocker - yeeouch. I’ll be moving to another service just because of those full-screen pop-ups.

I only used PB for family-friendly images. I have multiple redundant backups of all the stuff I uploaded to PB. It’s not a big loss to me. It does strike me as incredibly stupid of them though.

Re Flickr

I use this site for my ‘adult’ images. Because sometimes, you need to upload and share such things.

As an amateur, I’ve been very happy with Flickr. My only complaint is that they need to offer more control over how you share your uploads with others. AFAIK there’s no way you can give somebody a link to just one of your Flickr uploads without also giving access to everything you’ve posted in your public photostream. Granted, I don’t post anything there that I wouldn’t be perfectly comfortable having it seen by anyone else with an Internet connection. But there are times when you want to limit the discussion to one or a few specific images.

Also the terms “family” and “friends” as used by Flickr are less than intuitive.

Well, I actually used “professional” a little loosely there. I just mean if I took it as a very serious hobby and cared about my image rights, rather than just very occasionally posting pics on Facebook. Not that I’d have to actually get paid.

I know some good amateur photographers and would tell them to use Flickr, too.