Please don't link to Photobucket!

Post by **Sean** » Thu Jul 27, 2017 3:28 pm

I've just become aware that Photobucket no longer allows free third-party hosting of images. This means that users must pay a monthly service fee or else their embed links will be broken. Unfortunately, a few members have used Photobucket quite a bit, and so now many pictures are gone from their posts. This really sucks.

Please don't embed Photobucket images anymore on the forum. Thanks.

SGBob · Post by **SGBob** » Wed Aug 02, 2017 8:26 am

There are a few free image hosting sites:

http://www.imgur.com
https://imgtc.com/
https://kek.gg/
https://imgoat.com/

As always with anything stored "in the cloud," it may disappear at any moment without notice. Treat it as such.

Post by **dima** » Wed Aug 02, 2017 9:34 am

Doesn't myff host images themselves? Sean, is that what you do? That'd be preferable, since their image hosting would only go away together with the forum itself, an we'd have prior notice to migrate away.

Post by **Sean** » Wed Aug 02, 2017 1:25 pm

dima wrote: ↑Doesn't myff host images themselves? Sean, is that what you do? That'd be preferable, since their image hosting would only go away together with the forum itself, an we'd have prior notice to migrate away.

Yes, MYFF has a gallery (which BTW you can look at using a small link near the bottom left of the main page). I upload my pics to the MYFF gallery via the "Attach File" link when creating a post. But I first reduce the size of my pics to about 1MB before uploading, because the gallery won't accept much larger images. After successfully uploading, a MYFF embed code is automatically placed within the message body of the post.

Using the gallery can be cumbersome for those not in the habit of resizing their photos. The forum's photo resizing feature is not ideal and can't handle large images. Many people find it easier to upload their pics elsewhere and use provided links to embed the photos on forum posts. Others won't even go through that much trouble, and prefer more user-friendly media sites like Facebook.

Let's use the other thread to talk about specific ways to mitigate the photobucket problem.

Other than discouraging the use of fee-based third-party content, I'm not sure what we could or should do. People like having to upload their photos only once to places like Imgur and Flickr, and then it's easy to embed from there onto the forum. I use the MYFF gallery because I don't use services like Imgur or Flickr to store all my photos. I only upload low-res copies for my posts.