I’m screwed because every single image hosting site is blocked by my company.
If you try to put that link by itself on a line, you get the following message in the preview pane - Sorry, we were unable to generate a preview for this web page, because the web server returned an error code of 403. Instead of a preview, only a link will appear in your post.
That really works? When I try that, I get the error message, “sorry, you can’t embed media items in a post”. Does that have something to do with my Trust Level?
You can embed some kinds of media items in a post. But the url has to be a plain http://whatever.com/folder/folder/somefilneame.jpg or png or gif. If the url is some big complicated ball of junk like @ThisSpaceForRent posted, that (usually) won’t work.
There are also some urls that have characters in them or are so long they confuse Discourse. That’s another problem with @ThisSpaceForRent’s link even if I trim all the BS off after the “.jpg” part like this:
https://fark-usrimg-850.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/-/-m/fark_-mEQa8wlioEoG-KDEWcYbnv75gI.jpg
Last of all, you have to post the pic someplace that does not require a login. If you post to imgur, you’re logged on to imgur as you. So you might see the pic. But I don’t have an imgur account, and neither do most of everybody else. SO you need to be able to configure the security on the image so anybody on Earth can see it on imgur without needing to log in.
Some image sharing websites make that easy. Others make it impossible. I don’t use imgur myself and don’t know how easy/hard they are.
Question: I thought the whole matter of uploading images directly was supposed to be under discussion, or did that all fall by the wayside with the loss of TubaDiva?
The original prohibition on images seemed to be that inline images would ruin the “tone” of the site, or something. Since that hasn’t happened, and images have been a real benefit to better and more interesting communication, why not allow direct uploading? The prohibition seems like an archaic throwback to the times when storing bits was actually expensive. Today it’s essentially free. For images that I can’t link to directly, I can just upload them to IMGUR without even bothering to register. It’s a few Kbytes, no one cares. But it’s an extra couple of steps that shouldn’t really be necessary, and it creates a dependency on another site that may break at some point.
Imgur doesn’t require logging on. The only minor trickiness I’ve found is that by default it gives you a link to the album, not the particular photo, and Discourse doesn’t really interpret the album correctly. But it’s easy to get a link to the individual photo if needed.
Not exactly. IIRC, we’re using Discourse’s own hosting service:
I don’t know which plan we’re on, but say it’s the “Business” one for $300/mo. That only gives 100 GB storage, or 100,000 1 MB photos (not including other stuff). It’s not that much, really. We could easily burn through that in a few months. Even the more expensive Enterprise plans seem to only provide a few hundred GB.
Well, that’s disappointing considering that Discourse regards itself as a forward-looking organization. Google One (Google Drive) charges $10/month for 2 TB of cloud storage on even their consumer plans. Of course that’s just storage and not hosting services, but the incremental value of storage shouldn’t be very high. And I know of message boards with modest budgets that have been supporting unlimited image uploads for many years and manage to stay in business.
Yeah, it seems pretty low to me as well. BTW, the SDMB does show up on their customer page (click Associations):
I don’t have access to the financial side of things here, but I imagine that having to pay for increased storage space and increased network bandwidth is going to be a hard sell to the folks with the purse strings.
TubaDiva was opposed to having inline images at all. You should be happy that we are at least allowing them, even if we do require that the actual image hosting be done elsewhere.
I prefer ImgBB to Imgur, because it’s very simple to use, and you don’t even need to create an account to upload.
Just go the site, drag and drop an image, and get a link.
They offer links in a variety of formats – their ‘direct link’ is best for SDMB.
If you want to manage the images you’ve uploaded, or create albums, then you need to create a free account.
Again, you don’t need an account for Imgur either. Supports manually selecting files, drag and drop, and even direct pasting of the image data. Also has a phone app that can upload directly from the camera. I’m sure imgbb is fine too though.
Believe me, I am! 
I really do think it adds value to the site, and I think it’s generally being used responsibly. Of course sometimes it’s just done for fun, but that tends to happen in non-serious or Pit threads, like the wonderfully pleasant Pet Pictures thread! I’m not too stressed about not being able to upload images directly, but it would be convenient.
I haven’t looked into the details of ImgBB, but that sounds exactly the same as Imgur. I still haven’t bothered to create an account at Imgur, though probably I will at some point.
The complaint is directed more at Discourse and their less-than-modern amount of storage. Given the constraints, disabling local image hosting is the right move. It’s just weird that we don’t get several terabytes of storage for the amount we pay.
I’m sure Imgur is fine.
I prefer ImgBB because of the minimalist interface, the fact that it’s designed for linking to forums, and because it allows more graphics formats and larger uploads than Imgur.
It’s also a reputable site where all uploads are vetted by human editors.
TinyURL.
Not a tool I ever use. Probably nothing wrong with it, just not one of my use cases, so I can’t offer feedback on it.
What I don’t know is whether tinyurl gives you a URL that ends in “.jpg” or similar. If not, Discourse will NOT recognize it as a URL needing to rendered as a visible image as opposed to just a clickable link.