So, where do we go from here? All my photos are on PhotoBucket. Anyone have another site that's free and easy?
So, where do we go from here? All my photos are on PhotoBucket. Anyone have another site that's free and easy?
This is the risk of requiring your users to host their photos elsewhere. When Photobucket and other sites began eliminating 3rd party hosting, all the existing links on VAF will be useless. I'm a paid Photobucket subscriber so you'll see my photos through then end of December 2018. Then, any photos I've posted will show up as one of those hated ? icons.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Doug, I love VAF and have all the respect in the world for how you've structured your business model. But, this is a sea change. So, again, I suggest you consider a new business model that includes a paid subscription that allows users to upload and post photos directly on VAF. Most of your users are aircraft owners, people of means, and I expect most of us could afford a few extra bucks a year and would appreciate the convenience of being able to upload our photos directly. The bigger benefit though is you / VAF will own and hold the photos! No more nasty ? icons in pasts post.
What say you Doug? Can you implement a paid subscription, beyond the normal donation, that includes photo hosting?
This is the risk of requiring your users to host their photos elsewhere. When Photobucket and other sites began eliminating 3rd party hosting, all the existing links on VAF will be useless. I'm a paid Photobucket subscriber so you'll see my photos through then end of December 2018. Then, any photos I've posted will show up as one of those hated ? icons.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Doug, I love VAF and have all the respect in the world for how you've structured your business model. But, this is a sea change. So, again, I suggest you consider a new business model that includes a paid subscription that allows users to upload and post photos directly on VAF. Most of your users are aircraft owners, people of means, and I expect most of us could afford a few extra bucks a year and would appreciate the convenience of being able to upload our photos directly. The bigger benefit though is you / VAF will own and hold the photos! No more nasty ? icons in pasts post.
What say you Doug? Can you implement a paid subscription, beyond the normal donation, that includes photo hosting?
This is the risk of requiring your users to host their photos elsewhere. When Photobucket and other sites began eliminating 3rd party hosting, all the existing links on VAF will be useless. I'm a paid Photobucket subscriber so you'll see my photos through then end of December 2018. Then, any photos I've posted will show up as one of those hated ? icons.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Doug, I love VAF and have all the respect in the world for how you've structured your business model. But, this is a sea change. So, again, I suggest you consider a new business model that includes a paid subscription that allows users to upload and post photos directly on VAF. Most of your users are aircraft owners, people of means, and I expect most of us could afford a few extra bucks a year and would appreciate the convenience of being able to upload our photos directly. The bigger benefit though is you / VAF will own and hold the photos! No more nasty ? icons in pasts post.
What say you Doug? Can you implement a paid subscription, beyond the normal donation, that includes photo hosting?
There wont be getting around the dead links to any photobucket image. Even with a new image host who would go back through all their posts over the years just to re insert new links?
The usefulness of VAF after Dec 31 just took a serious blow.
I feel like a sucker having relied on the free level of Photobucket.
...
The hardest part was finding the posts the contained photos. It would be real handy if there were a way to search for our posts that had photos. In the Advanced Search, if I could have done a "Search by User Name" for posts that contained the string "" it would have made that easy.[/QUOTE]
I think a google search will do what you want instead of a VAF search.
In my case a Google search using "photobucket az_gila site://www.vansairforce.com/" seems to bring up links to my posts with pictures
I think a google search will do what you want instead of a VAF search.
In my case a Google search using "photobucket az_gila site://www.vansairforce.com/" seems to bring up links to my posts with pictures
Naturally they want money to eliminate the ads.
Which is not unreasonable. Either the advertisers pay, or the users pay. For sure, somebody has to pay the bills. I have no objection to a paid account, with Photobucket, or with Doug. The issue is price vs value. I am not willing to pay $399 per year to illustrate forum posts for the benefit of others.
Useful statistics: I have a lot of images posted to VAF, about 10 years worth, as I post technical references as well as build and flight photos. Even so, my entire Photobucket storage is only 0.2 GB, for which I'm currently paying Photobucket about $30 per year.
But it does work:
Oops!
I assumed if I saw I in the post, everyone would.
Can no one see the images I posted from Google Photos?
I'm fine continuing with Flickr, but it's nice to have options.
Oops!
I assumed if I saw I in the post, everyone would.
Can no one see the images I posted from Google Photos?
I'm fine continuing with Flickr, but it's nice to have options.
I can see the one in your pic in post 26 OK ...
But not in post 24?
But not in post 24?
The hardest part was finding the posts the contained photos. It would be real handy if there were a way to search for our posts that had photos. In the Advanced Search, if I could have done a "Search by User Name" for posts that contained the string "" it would have made that easy.[/QUOTE]
If it were possible, I suspect it would have happened by now. I've asked about this many times but received zero response.
I tried az_gila's trick of searching using Google (I tried "picasa Snowflake site:www.vansairforce.com"), but that returns a lot of discussions about what photo hosting site to use, what site not to use, complaints about hosting sites, etc. as well as posts where i've used Picasa to host images. It still seems to me that it would be easier to do a search just within VAF for posts that have picasa and [IMG] tags. Unfortunately Google doesn't see the [IMG] tags, those only show up when you edit the post. But they are stored in the post text on VAF, so a local search function should be able to find it.
I tried az_gila's trick of searching using Google (I tried "picasa Snowflake site:www.vansairforce.com"), but that returns a lot of discussions about what photo hosting site to use, what site not to use, complaints about hosting sites, etc. as well as posts where i've used Picasa to host images. It still seems to me that it would be easier to do a search just within VAF for posts that have picasa and tags. Unfortunately Google doesn't see the [IMG] tags, those only show up when you edit the post. But they are stored in the post text on VAF, so a local search function should be able to find it.[/QUOTE]
I had that problem too but fortunately my PhotoBucket UserID was different from my VAF ID and I just did a search for my PhotoBucket UserID instead. Worked well for me but does depend on having a discrete PhotoBucket ID.
This image is from Google Photos. Right click on image, copy image address and use "insert image" icon on VAF. Works from this end. Let me know if the image comes through to you all.
I would only add to Vernon's excellent post that another necessary step in the process is to resize your photos to a maximum width of 900 pixels before you upload them to your site. I think Photobucket must do that automatically.
I didn't get into sizing because the post was getting long and sizing is impossible to do so that everyone gets the best picture they can. The problem is there is no way to know all the screen rations (16-9,5-4, etc.) or the resolution each user is using. This is further complicated by folks using the zoom setting in the "view" menu to make the small print more readable. I can tell Pat had been doing this a while because he has the magic number that works best for 90% of the screens folks will be looking at.
I edited my post to show you an example of that different sizing does. The top image is 800 pixels wide (the width is what matters), the second image I added below is 1100 pixels wide. As you can see the second image is more readable but will force a scroll bar to come across the bottom of the screen to accommodate the too large image. Our friend Chkaharyer99 with his great picture of vertical flight probably uploaded a picture over 1400 pixels wide which really blows up the page. As you can see it is necessary to use the horizontal scroll bar now to read a line of text. This is why the expensive forums have gone to picture hosting, they do auto sizing so this does not happen.
For anyone using Windows (there may be a similar app for Mac and Linux, but I haven't looked), there is an excellent tool for resizing pictures. It does a really good job of reducing the file size as well, I find the default settings for JPG quality are a great balance of small files and no loss of image quality. This started out as a Microsoft tool a few versions of Windows ago, but they abandoned it so someone else coded up an equivalent.
It's trivial to use, too... Just right click on any image (or set of images), choose "resize image" and then choose your output size. You can pick a custom size too, like 1000 pixels, if you want. Then you can upload to whatever your hosting site is, and the smaller file size will save you bandwidth costs.
http://www.bricelam.net/ImageResizer/
I edited my post to show you an example of that different sizing does. The top image is 800 pixels wide (the width is what matters), the second image I added below is 1100 pixels wide. As you can see the second image is more readable but will force a scroll bar to come across the bottom of the screen to accommodate the too large image. Our friend Chkaharyer99 with his great picture of vertical flight probably uploaded a picture over 1400 pixels wide which really blows up the page. As you can see it is necessary to use the horizontal scroll bar now to read a line of text. This is why the expensive forums have gone to picture hosting, they do auto sizing so this does not happen.