Which Photo Hosting Site for Images to be used on Forums

peterm1

peterm1

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I have a dilemma. I use my Flickr account exclusively for images that I regard as my better ones or at least my attempts at better ones. And I do not really want to pollute my photostream with images that are just "throw-away" ones. Such as the photos I want to post on a forum to show something - such as how I have stuffed up an image. Or photos of my camera gear or something of that sort. Quite often images are needed for Boards like this one of course which effectively do not allow uploads (OK I know you can post a miniscule image through upload). I have no issue with that but that is my dilemma.

I used to use Photobucket for this purpose (originally for all hosting of my images) but that site has now been destroyed by those who run it. It became slow and buggy as well as ugly - full of pop ups in inopportune locations etc but that was OK for the above sorts of images where all I needed was a home with a URL. Then they banned embedding Photobucket hosted images being posted on other sites. Which now makes that Photobucket worthless.

So what on earth do I do?. I am not sure if I can use my own cloud account like drop box or if this is wise given security issues etc. Can anyone advise me what they do or would advise me to try. Which cheap (Preferably free) hosting site do you use for this kind of purpose - or do you just not worry and lump all you photos, good bad and indifferent into one hosting site.
 
I belong to the LUG (Leica Users Group). This is a Listserv kind of thing that was common before internet forums became so popular. The owner of the site also set up a picture hosting site called the LUG gallery. This is where I stick all of the photos I want to post on RFF and other sites. It’s free too. Google “Leica Users Gallery” to see what it looks like.

Jim B.
 
I've been using PBase at www.pbase.com for a number of years.

It is definitely not free, however you get a lot of features for the price you pay. As I recall, it costs something like $20-25 per year.

It keeps track of hit counts, so you can always tell which images are the most viewed for the visitors to your site. You also get quite a bit of storage.

Most importantly, it's easy to post images here on RFF when you use PBase. I just copy the URL from one of my images and use the Insert Image icon above the message box here on RFF.
 
Peter, why not just use the viewing privacy settings on Flickr? You can set it so that only you can see the pictures on Flickr, but that doesn't stop you from linking the picture to an RFF thread and it being visible there. You can set up an dedicated album in Flickr for these photos and no-one will be able to view the photos in the album.
 
lynnb said:
Peter, why not just use the viewing privacy settings on Flickr? You can set it so that only you can see the pictures on Flickr, but that doesn't stop you from linking the picture to an RFF thread and it being visible there. You can set up an dedicated album in Flickr for these photos and no-one will be able to view the photos in the album.
Click to expand...

Peter, I agree with Lynn. Make a private album on Flickr and do your forum sharing from there.

John
 
As Lynn and Johnwolf mention I also do.
Only about 10% of my images stored on flickr are public yet, I link the private ones here on occasion without any issues.
The one thing to consider is, if you ever change the privacy setting on an image... it breaks the existing link when the url is changed.

Flickr has its downfalls but it's also still standing and generally works pretty well.
 
I use Flickr

I use Flickr

Dear Peter,

I use Flickr for photo hosting. As bad as I am it's better to waste their bandwidth than bandwidth I have to purchase.

Regards,

Tim Murphy

Harrisburg, PA 🙂
 
f16sunshine said:
As Lynn and Johnwolf mention I also do.
Only about 10% of my images stored on flickr are public yet, I link the private ones here on occasion without any issues.
The one thing to consider is, if you ever change the privacy setting on an image... it breaks the existing link when the url is changed.

Flickr has its downfalls but it's also still standing and generally works pretty well.
Click to expand...

OK that seems to answer one question I had. It sounds from what you say that a photo uploaded to Flickr and marked "private" can be embedded successfully in say RFF and will show up on the forum site. Is this how I read our post? If so I suppose that means I could just use Flickr, mark as private the photos I don't want general visitors to Flickr to see, and perhaps also put them in a Flickr Album to keep these sorts of photos together.

It had occurred to me it might be an option but for some reason I convinced myself that an image marked private would not show up (for 3rd party viewers) when embedded in another site.
 
michaelwj said:
The RFF gallery is where I put the images I want to show on RFF. Easy.
Click to expand...


The last time I tried to upload a photo directly into one of my posts from my PC, RFF told me I had to resize it to 500x500 pixels - which is far too small. Unless there is something else I do not know about............................................if it is possible to load photos into a specific RFF gallery how is that done please? (I see the link above at the top of page, but no upload link)
 
peterm1 said:
The last time I tried to upload a photo directly into one of my posts from my PC, RFF told me I had to resize it to 500x500 pixels - which is far too small. Unless there is something else I do not know about............................................if it is possible to load photos into a specific RFF gallery how is that done please? (I see the link above at the top of page, but no upload link)
Click to expand...

How big to you need them to be just for illustrating something on the forum?
 
Like the OP, I prefer to host rubbish/temporary/one-off images somewhere other than on my dedicated photography sites. With the demise of Photobucket, I now use Imgur.

Unlike Photobucket, Imgur appears to have some business sense - not only has it been around for a while but it hosts massive numbers of images and appears to be growing as a company, so hopefully it'll stay around and not break the web like Photobucket! Review here: https://www.thebalance.com/imgur-review-1357009

One thing I like about Imgur is that you can set your account to private - people can't access your Imgur page directly, but image links remain public so you can still see them in, say, RFF posts.

I've also toyed with the idea of hosting "throwaway" images on my own website (www.richcutler.co.uk) - simply uploaded to a "bucket" folder using FTP. But (a) it's less hassle using a dedicated image site like Imgur and (b) if someone else is happy to keep my c***p, I'm up for that!

Anyway, Peter: https://imgur.com is my suggestion! Set to private...
 
I use my own site for stuff I want to feature, and flickr for images I kinda consider dead storage. I've never worried about privacy. There's nothing there I particularly mind if someone else sees, although most would be bored to tears paging through it.
 
peterm1 said:
OK that seems to answer one question I had. It sounds from what you say that a photo uploaded to Flickr and marked "private" can be embedded successfully in say RFF and will show up on the forum site. Is this how I read our post? If so I suppose that means I could just use Flickr, mark as private the photos I don't want general visitors to Flickr to see, and perhaps also put them in a Flickr Album to keep these sorts of photos together.

It had occurred to me it might be an option but for some reason I convinced myself that an image marked private would not show up (for 3rd party viewers) when embedded in another site.
Click to expand...

Peter, yes, that's the concept. But I would try making the album private, instead of tagging each photo as private. I can't test it today, but I believe that will work.

John
 
I use DropBox. I only use DropBox for this purpose. I don't stay logged into DropBox either to minimize risk.

Many other Cloud storage products offer similar linking capabilities. I once used Flickr, but I gave up on that platform. I'm not using social-media image platforms, but some of these (Instagram, Tumblr) could be convenient solutions.

Another option for some of us is the free file storage provided by our website hosting companies. This could be slightly less automatic to upload and create the links. But it does work. I used this method for client image delivery (zipped image Folder downloads).

I'm lazy and DropBox is convenient.
 
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