I’ve been using my twitter account, but I have little confidence that the links won’t break in a couple of years or months. What image hosting site plays nicest here (and at other places)? Consumer comparisons, online reviews, and general comments are also encouraged.
I don’t know about nicest, but I’ve been using imgur for years and so far it has been working pretty well.
I posted this image 3 years ago and it’s still there:
I use Imgur. Unfortunately, I’m no more confident in them not breaking old links than Twitter, or anyone else for that matter. Imgur has already announced that they’ll be deleting old content not tied to an account:
Well yeah, I use Imgur for all kinds of stuff that might not be accessed for years at a time, until it turns out to be useful.
Some people use postimg.cc. But it’s blocked by my workplace and I can’t see anything. Maybe that’s just where I work, but I suspect that if we block it, so do lots of other places. Our policy is pretty lenient overall.
I don’t think there’s any high reliability site that isn’t paid for. I’d almost suggest Google Drive… but Google might just cancel the whole service when they get tired of it.
Imgur works, but you need to create an account now. If you upload without an account, the image may get deleted after a certain amount of time if it’s not being used.
Yeah. I’ve always had an account so that aspect may not affect me.
The trouble is that if they can tweak their ToS once, they can do so again. Tomorrow, it’s that they delete old images from accounts they deem inactive. And the day after, they delete old images from non-paid accounts. Etc.
Funny how “the internet is forever” when the content is embarrassing or personally damaging and you want to remove it, but the internet is also ephemeral and unreliable when the content is valuable and interesting and you would prefer it persists.
For the many of us who block twitter and always have, you’ve never posted a usable image.
Assuming you have a Google account (and who doesn’t?), Google Drive is their cloud storage for storing files of all kinds. Those aren’t going to be deleted any time soon unless they want to go out of business promptly.
You can create a folder in Google drive that’s publicly accessible to any/everyone with the URL, no logon required. The upload your image into that folder, click “share” to get the URL of the image, and post that URL here. The horizon pic in my profile (not my pink “LSL” avatar) is stored & referenced that way and has been since we came to Discourse.
I use imgBB.
Can’t remember why.
It works.
Pictures I post here are usually pictures I’ve already posted on Facebook.
I use Imgur but I have no faith that it won’t eventually stop working.
There is no such thing as a guaranteed permanent hosting site.
Me, for one.