Where to find free Photo Sharing sites.

[Raymo]

Originally Posted by Tommycat

I'll give it a try...Did my Flickr pic come thru?

Imgur pic.......Wow that was easy!

Flickr and Imgur pics visible?

Imgur pic is visible. I use it also. Free and easy.

[rv8ch]

Originally Posted by Snowflake

If only there were a built-in way to upload images to VAF...

+1 on this. Not sure why this is not enabled, disk space is so cheap now, and it would add a lot of value to VAF.

[ed. Let me know when you get your 'cheap' photo hosting site online! I'll use it! <grin>. fmi: Read the first paragraph HERE dr]

[salto]

I struggled trying to load a visible picture using photo bucket. Kept thinking with each failure 'this shouldn't be that hard'. I finally had success when I tried my android phone instead of the Ipad. My conclusion was seeing I used the same steps was that photo bucket is a Samsung or Sony site which of course use the android system on their phones.

[Snowflake]

Originally Posted by rv8ch

+1 on this. Not sure why this is not enabled, disk space is so cheap now, and it would add a lot of value to VAF.

[ed. Let me know when you get your 'cheap' photo hosting site online! I'll use it! <grin>. fmi: Read the first paragraph HERE dr]

Doug and I have discussed this before, but the concerns are disk space and bandwidth.

A dedicated photo site (that isn't controlled by Doug) would not help the problem, because that's the only reason people would come to it, to store photos. To just host photos is a horrible business model, the only way to make money at it would be to prevent embedded linking and force all visits through an ad-supported page. In fact, that's what most of them do. They start off allowing embedded links, and when they grow large enough and realize they need money to store and display everyone's full 16MP images they switch to a pay-to-use model or a massively ad-supported site that nobody wants. That's when everyone moves to the next free site, the old links die, and VAF loses another block of history.

Disk space can be mitigated by limiting uploads to 1024x768 images, and a maximum file size. Doing so would mitigate bandwidth concerns as well. If you're going to force people to do work on their end (finding a photo site and learning how to use it) why not force them to learn how to make smaller photos instead, and then use *one* standard image upload system here on VAF?

But these arguments have been made before, and Doug doesn't agree... So nothing has happened.

At a bare minimum, if Doug could code up a way to search for images within VAF, so they could be moved and re-linked to new sites, it would allow users to find the photos they've posted over the years and re-link them. If I could search for the string "picasaweb" in all of my 2000+ posts, I could go through and re-link any images to google photos... The photos are still there, just at a new site. But even that's not possible.

[ed. Again, I’d ask folks to take a moment and think about just how much disk space and bandwidth we are talking about here if I were to host images, regardless of the size. At the very least it would require a 180* shift in the current business model of VAF – going from a donation model where everyone can see everything (even potential builders) to a pay to view model (which don’t historically grow or last if you’ve ready the case studies I have). My life is complicated enough ;^).

So, I currently pay $3.99/mo for UNLIMITED photo disk space on a smugmug.com account (fmi: https://www.smugmug.com/plans/basic). The URL to my albums is: https://dougreeves.smugmug.com/browse. Many of those albums are private and contain, for example, the 2,000+ pictures off my iPhone (as a backup). And my kids. And my wife’s.

This text from the SmugMug site: “Can I upload unlimited photos? Really? Yes! Truly! We’re not kidding! We want you to be able to share and archive each and every photo. From cute cat photos to epic globetrotting landscapes, we want them all—not just your ten best. So if you have 1,000 or 1,000,000 (or more), we double-dog dare you to upload everything you’ve got.”

I cannot afford to host images from 22,000+ registered forum users on my VAF site. Rob, you’ve kindly sent me a note (or post) regarding why I should host images on a somewhat regular basis. While I thank you for the feedback, I am not going to host images for the foreseeable future.
My current recommendation is for those interested in using a lot of pictures in their posts to pay for their own photo hosting account somewhere (Flickr, SmugMug, etc). It gets around the ads on the free sites and it doesn’t increase my overhead or workload.

BBVA Compass Stadium in Houston, TX holds 22,000 people – that’s about the size of the registered VAF forum users. Here is a picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBVA_C...yline_View.JPG . Now imaging hosting the images uploaded by everyone in these seats. And betting your financial future on whether or not it works.

$3.99/mo might be worth having an unlimited photo storage option.

v/r,
dr]

[Snowflake]

I will ask this again: If I could search for the string "picasaweb" in all of my 2000+ posts, I could go through and re-link any images to google photos... The photos are still there, just at the new site. The "search" function doesn't seem to search within links in posts though. Can you find some clever way to do this?

[ed. Again, I’d ask folks to take a moment and think about just how much disk space and bandwidth we are talking about here if I were to host images, regardless of the size.]

If we assume each of your 22,000 members uploaded 1000 images, and each one was limited to 500kb each, you'd need about 11TB of storage. But we both know that a lot of visitors to VAF don't post anything at all. Many only post text. Some post images, and a few post a lot of them. So an "average" of 1000 photos per member is probably vastly over-estimating the storage requirements. I would bet that all of the photos currently linked to (via active links or old broken ones) could be resized to no larger than 1200x800 pixels each and stored on a 1TB drive.

Can you collect any stats that show how many photos are linked off-site from posts, or how many page-views you have on said posts? That might help you better understand the requirements.

When Picasa shut down, it rendered dozens of posts here useless. I kept a list for a while in hopes that you might find a way to search for the photos so we could re-link them to Google Photos, but that didn't happen so I stopped tracking them. As other hosting sites fall (or even just change their internal file storage structures as they expand) the problem will continue.

Anyway, enough for this round. I'll let it go for another year.

[rv8ch]

Not at all trying to tell you how to run your biz Doug, you seem to be doing fine!

If Rob's math is correct, using AWS storage pricing 11 TB would be $269/month. No idea what your current web hosting company charges per TB, but probably about that.

Perhaps you could enable file hosting only for those that pay you? You could then charge us an extra $4/month.

This is not for me or others that understand the technology, and have no issue hosting our images, it's for those that use an image storage system that disappears and then the VAF community loses that knowledge.

Would you have any issue with someone scraping the site to grab the IMG links and copying the images? That might be something we could code up quickly and would be like a VAF archive of images stored safely in case some disappear.

Thanks for the discussion!

[Snowflake]

Originally Posted by rv8ch

If Rob's math is correct, using AWS storage pricing 11 TB would be $269/month. No idea what your current web hosting company charges per TB, but probably about that.

Except you don't need 11TB, and I doubt you even need 1TB.

This is not for me or others that understand the technology, and have no issue hosting our images, it's for those that use an image storage system that disappears and then the VAF community loses that knowledge.

Exactly.

Aside: Doug, when you reply directly into someone's post, it doesn't reset the "unread" flag on the post, and the thread doesn't show up in the list of "new" posts... If you quote and reply like we have to, we'll know you've been here.

[flytoday]

Test of new TinyPic



Here

Test out

Carl

[1flyingyogi]

I have never had luck embedding images. Testing to see if it works this time.

[IMG][/IMG]

Looks like it works! Thanks for the tinypic suggestion.

[Piper J3]

I used to use TinyPic for embedding image in VAF. Now I use postimages.org. Much easier to use. Two simple screens?





Sample Pic?