Just a thought and I know it means some duplication of effort but there are options for unlimited free storage without sharing. There are also sites that offer limited/relatively cheap or free storage and sharing. Is it viable for people to store all of their pics in one place and just use the sharing option for the actual photos they want to share.
PHOTO bucket
- Thread starter bazmak
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Help Support Home Model Engine Machinist Forum:
Cogsy--nearly all of the picture hosting sites have a free 30 day try-out option to suck you in. Then when the 30 days are up they say you have to have a paid subscription or you lose what you posted during the 'free" month. I paid my money up front before I posted anything to Imageshack.
Cogsy
Well-Known Member
Brian - this was about 4-5 years ago and I used them for about a year, then overnight they blocked access to all the 'free' account users and demanded a subscription fee to continue, very similar to how Photobucket suddenly changed their service. I'm not saying they're offering a bad deal now, it's just I don't trust them not to do a similar thing in the future and alter the properties of their accounts overnight and effectively going on another 'cash grab'.
Tony - That sounds like a reasonable plan if you've got the time to do the extra work, just make sure you keep a copy of your content offline as well (on a hard drive) in case the free hosting suddenly disappears and you lose access.
Tony - That sounds like a reasonable plan if you've got the time to do the extra work, just make sure you keep a copy of your content offline as well (on a hard drive) in case the free hosting suddenly disappears and you lose access.
bruedney
Well-Known Member
Like Google (not unlimited but you get 15Gb - that is still a lot of photos)
Which is what I use!
Bruce
I have been using postimage for a few years now and find it better than Photobucket as it loads and opens much quicker, nothing says they won't eventually go the same way though.
Lets face it the days of free stuff are rapidly coming to a close.
Dan.
Lets face it the days of free stuff are rapidly coming to a close.
Dan.
rodw
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Bruce, I'd really appreciate it if you could outline how you manage your photos on Google and how you embed them in forum posts. I tried last night with no luck.
I've been using a paid version of Google Apps for years but it has never been as good as Photobucket. It seems everybody is vying for my phone photos these days. If I want to send a quick photo in an email, I take the photo on my phone and by the time I get back to my PC it is stored on Photobucket and I can paste it into an email. LUcky I've been on a paid plan with Photobucket so I still have the service.
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This is a disaster in so many ways but it isn't just Home Model Engine Machinist that is having problems, I'm seeing many of the forums I visit going to hell because of photo bucket.
The only good thing here is that modern hosting services are offering a lot more capacity for a given price. Still you can quickly get into requiring Terra Bytes of storage space to host more than a years worth of pictures. Plus you need a backup plan for all of that data.
I really don't blame the forum owners here, everybody that uses the internet expects everything to be free. Frankly that makes no sense at all but it does cause forum owners to minimize expenses. Frankly advertising isn't the answer either as that leads to the user paying huge bandwidth fees due to all the advertising on a site. In the end the mind set of the user community has to change, that means paying a membership or subscription fee to access the forum.
A subscription fee would certainly work for larger sites, but I'm not sure if Home Model Engine Machinist has enough users to cover the expenses of running the site. I know there are some out here that will reject the paying of a subscription fee but we need to look to the past before the internet. The only way to be part of this community back then would have been to purchase a magazine subscription or two. That would leave you with what amounted to one way communications. Frankly I'm not sure what people are willing to pay but a decent magazine subscription can easily be $40 a year.
Like I said at the beginning Photo Bucket has made a mess of many forums covering a wide array of interests. I don't think anybody in their right mind will be paying them $400 bucks a year so a lot of these old forums will end up useless as people here are describing. Because of the lack of ethical behavior on the part of Photo Bucket, I can't see anybody wanting to do business with them even if they only charged $40 bucks a year. Sometimes you just have to put your foot down and look to the alternatives.
Right now the only real alternative I can advocate is to have the forums store data locally. That means a massive increase in storage space, backup space and manage meant time. In the end the problem is this, you can't trust these photo management services. Even if you could "trust them" you still have the reality that running these businesses isn't cost free.
The old adage that a photo is worth a thousands words is still true today.
This gets complicated quick but the overriding factor is the cost to support a massive increase in bandwidth. A thread that is all text might require a 10kB download per thread while once serving up pictures with that text may be will into the multiple mega bytes of data.
The only good thing here is that modern hosting services are offering a lot more capacity for a given price. Still you can quickly get into requiring Terra Bytes of storage space to host more than a years worth of pictures. Plus you need a backup plan for all of that data.
I really don't blame the forum owners here, everybody that uses the internet expects everything to be free. Frankly that makes no sense at all but it does cause forum owners to minimize expenses. Frankly advertising isn't the answer either as that leads to the user paying huge bandwidth fees due to all the advertising on a site. In the end the mind set of the user community has to change, that means paying a membership or subscription fee to access the forum.
A subscription fee would certainly work for larger sites, but I'm not sure if Home Model Engine Machinist has enough users to cover the expenses of running the site. I know there are some out here that will reject the paying of a subscription fee but we need to look to the past before the internet. The only way to be part of this community back then would have been to purchase a magazine subscription or two. That would leave you with what amounted to one way communications. Frankly I'm not sure what people are willing to pay but a decent magazine subscription can easily be $40 a year.
Like I said at the beginning Photo Bucket has made a mess of many forums covering a wide array of interests. I don't think anybody in their right mind will be paying them $400 bucks a year so a lot of these old forums will end up useless as people here are describing. Because of the lack of ethical behavior on the part of Photo Bucket, I can't see anybody wanting to do business with them even if they only charged $40 bucks a year. Sometimes you just have to put your foot down and look to the alternatives.
Right now the only real alternative I can advocate is to have the forums store data locally. That means a massive increase in storage space, backup space and manage meant time. In the end the problem is this, you can't trust these photo management services. Even if you could "trust them" you still have the reality that running these businesses isn't cost free.
The way a forum behaves with onsite hosting is a function of software and how the user configures that software. The software issues can be addressed that I'm confident in.
As far as performance goes that is a hardware and software issue. These days one can buy a sever with a massive number of cores and extremely fast storage subsystems so hardware isn't the big issue it use to be. I'm not sure how many are logged in at the moment but lets face it this isn't a site that gets real heavy with many users logged in all at once. Remember there are more than a few people out there that think we are nuts to be Turing chinks of metal into machine and engines.
Frankly in some cases the site might even run faster instead of linking to PB which can be slow and serves up its own ads.
Yes this is what sucks more than anything, I'm already seeing many sites that frankly look like hell with PB obnoxious standing photo. In the end though we really need to reject this move by PB. For me it isn't the annual cost even if the tis grossly expensive, but rather it is the sleazy way they went about implementing this non-sense.
I would imagine that is a parameter that can be set easily. That is they could configure to allow updating for an arbitrary number of years. The question is how many people would be willing to go back 3, 5 or even ten years to update a bunch of photo links.
That bings up an interesting question, have the forum owners said anything yet with respect to this problem? In the end the forum owners are the only ones that can offer up a real solution.
Yes, the forum should host pictures itself. If need be they will have to update or change the forums software to clean up how pictures are handled onsite.
Ultimately they will have to start charging a subscription fee to cover the additional expense of hosting the pictures themselves. If they can keep that fee in line with a decent magazine fee I think they will get enough buy in to remain viable. A lot of hedging with the "think" there because it really depends upon how many active users the site can maintain.
Notably many sites have split access. That is one level, the free one, gets you access to text. If you want the photos you end up having to subscribe. Sure it sucks to have to pay to see a picture but the idea that everything on the net is free needs to die.
There is a second option, that likely won't work, but that is to plaster every single page of the site with advertisements. I'm already running an ad blocker due to the high frustration some sites create, so I don't believe it is a successful path. Frankly many sites have been ruined via heavy advertising so I don't want to see Home Model Engine Machinist going the same way.
Abby that is exactly what is happening. The unfortunate thing here is the way PB handled this change.
Ultimately I see all of these services going the same way, maybe not to the extent of PB with the massive gouging but somebody has to pay for the plant and utilities.
Cogsy
Well-Known Member
This is exactly what you yourself are advocating for this very site. You suggest that all the 'users' pay a subscription for the site to continue to function and liken it to a magazine subscription. However, the difference is that a core of users is generating the very content being delivered which is completely unlike a conventional magazine. The users generating content are not likely to want to pay for the sole privilege of sharing their knowledge, while at the same time giving up ownership of copyrighted photos for the forum owners to generate income from.
The vast majority of all internet income is generated from ad-serving on popular sites and very few subscription-only based forums are viable - I'd hazard a guess that the only ones truly viable are likely shady places with highly illegal content. Without free, or realistically cheap, photo hosting sites then enforced ad-serving is likely the price us users will have to pay to continue to enjoy forums like this. Unfortunately, the increasing prevalence of ad blocking software is ever decreasing revenues from ad-serving and proportionally reducing the viability of less popular sites. I fear without services like Photoboucket used to offer, forums like this one are likely to disappear.
Al,
I don't like forum hosting one bit, for one, it makes posting very difficult. I was going to resurrect one of my posts, which half way through contains over 200 pictures, all used to describe the techniques and why it was done that way, some of the individual posts contain over 30 pictures, imagine a bit of text followed by a load of non indexed pictures, as some people are doing already ??????? You just wouldn't know where to look next.
I even thought of numbering my pictures so at the very beginning of the post I could write some words and index it to a picture half a mile below, but again, people would feel sick going up and down the post like a roller coaster trying to keep in synch between text and picture.
I personally will not go down that route..
With regards to people not posting but still able to look at complete posts, other sites use a posting rule (useful posts or genuine questions, not 'this is where I come from" or 'what lathe should I buy' types) before they have full access to the sites posts, so anyone not contributing gets nowhere and nothing, except access to their own posts and the replies to them, until they qualify..
I don't know about this site as I have been a member since the very beginning and have been able to always see the images on here, but you only have to look at MEM, where if you are not a member or not signed in, the only posts you can see pictures in are the ones where people link to an external host.
The only way a site would satisfy my personal needs would be to allow site hosted pictures to be placed within text, and the copyright to remain mine. For at least a couple of thousand pictures.
John
I don't like forum hosting one bit, for one, it makes posting very difficult. I was going to resurrect one of my posts, which half way through contains over 200 pictures, all used to describe the techniques and why it was done that way, some of the individual posts contain over 30 pictures, imagine a bit of text followed by a load of non indexed pictures, as some people are doing already ??????? You just wouldn't know where to look next.
I even thought of numbering my pictures so at the very beginning of the post I could write some words and index it to a picture half a mile below, but again, people would feel sick going up and down the post like a roller coaster trying to keep in synch between text and picture.
I personally will not go down that route..
With regards to people not posting but still able to look at complete posts, other sites use a posting rule (useful posts or genuine questions, not 'this is where I come from" or 'what lathe should I buy' types) before they have full access to the sites posts, so anyone not contributing gets nowhere and nothing, except access to their own posts and the replies to them, until they qualify..
I don't know about this site as I have been a member since the very beginning and have been able to always see the images on here, but you only have to look at MEM, where if you are not a member or not signed in, the only posts you can see pictures in are the ones where people link to an external host.
The only way a site would satisfy my personal needs would be to allow site hosted pictures to be placed within text, and the copyright to remain mine. For at least a couple of thousand pictures.
John
Another problem with forum hosted pics is when some twonk decides to copy / paste a post with say 20 embedded pictures just to ad "nice job" at the end.
One forum I moderate on, if I see this type of post I just delete it with no reason given.
Same with the Google Goons who do noting but post endless Google links to pages they don't have a clue on
One forum I moderate on, if I see this type of post I just delete it with no reason given.
Same with the Google Goons who do noting but post endless Google links to pages they don't have a clue on
bruedney
Well-Known Member
Hi Rod
I'll do a post with screen shots tonight or tomorrow - But basically I just open the photo in Google Photos and resize the browser to nice size and use the "copy image address from the right click menu.
I do have some problems with my phone pics though and I think that is because they are uploaded directly to Google photos as opposed to my camera files being uploaded via Google drive sync
Bruce
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I've copied all my pics from Photobucket to Imgur and updated all my pictures on the MECH forum as it allows editing of your own posts. Moderators can you investigate the fesibility of doing that here please?
On the subject of image loading times, there is no need to load pictures of 5Mb to these hosting platforms. preprocess them with the Fastone image re-sizer to 1024 x 768 or even 800 x 600 and they are perfectly adequate for the forums (5Mb becomes 100kb). Plus you can add a watermark.
Example.
The other nice thing about Imgur is the direct access to BBCode. The copied URL can be pasted directly into your post. without any further action
["img]http://i.imgur.com/DIct2x4.jpg[/img"] (" quotes added to demo the code")
Pete
rodw
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Bruce, Thanks. I think phone photos has been Photobuckets undoing. I use it all the time becasue I can take a photo and then go back in the office and email it to somebody using gmail from my PC as its already in Photobucket. Pre mobile phone photos, I would always down sample all my photos using the batch mode processing in the free tool Irfanview. So they allowed their storage requirements go out the window with their mobile app!
I've got over 5000 photos on Photobucket and they are posted on many forums around the web. When my subscription expires and they take them off line, there is no way I'm going to revise my postings so they will be gone forever!
I am a big Google apps user so having the ability to use their ecosystem would be great. But I do see that even Samsung are trying to get me to sync my phone photos to them.
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I've now fixed all my posts on the MECH and MEM forums but for some reason can't do it here. I can edit recent posts but don't get that option on any older posts.
If you want this forum updated can the moderators/admins investigate please and come back with a fix or reason why it can't be done?
Pete
Pete,
I have been trying for ages to get posts unlocked so that I can change the pictures, but it seems that admin is both deaf, dumb AND blind to what the members want. We haven't heard a peep out of them despite us asking.
Because of their inaction, this site will soon disappear when member pics get removed by PB. I won't be paying a new small subscription for next year to take me to the end of 2018, mine will all be gone at the end of this year, or even sooner if my subscription runs out. If they can't be bothered to take action to save this site, why should we?
The only other way is to get admin to pay the $399 subscription for all of us on PB each year, (pigs might also fly) then they can still have our pictures in our posts. Why should we have to pay out to keep this site running as it has been.
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I have also just picked this up from another site where they are discussing the same thing about where to go.
Supposedly thia is in the terms and conditions of this hoster.
... Also, don't use Imgur to host image libraries you link to from elsewhere, content for your website, advertising, avatars, or anything else that turns us into your content delivery network. If you do – and we will be the judge – or if you do anything illegal, in addition to any other legal rights we may have, we will ban you along with the site you're hotlinking from, delete all your images, report you to the authorities if necessary, and prevent you from viewing any images hosted on Imgur.com. We mean it.
John
I have been trying for ages to get posts unlocked so that I can change the pictures, but it seems that admin is both deaf, dumb AND blind to what the members want. We haven't heard a peep out of them despite us asking.
Because of their inaction, this site will soon disappear when member pics get removed by PB. I won't be paying a new small subscription for next year to take me to the end of 2018, mine will all be gone at the end of this year, or even sooner if my subscription runs out. If they can't be bothered to take action to save this site, why should we?
The only other way is to get admin to pay the $399 subscription for all of us on PB each year, (pigs might also fly) then they can still have our pictures in our posts. Why should we have to pay out to keep this site running as it has been.
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I have also just picked this up from another site where they are discussing the same thing about where to go.
Supposedly thia is in the terms and conditions of this hoster.
... Also, don't use Imgur to host image libraries you link to from elsewhere, content for your website, advertising, avatars, or anything else that turns us into your content delivery network. If you do – and we will be the judge – or if you do anything illegal, in addition to any other legal rights we may have, we will ban you along with the site you're hotlinking from, delete all your images, report you to the authorities if necessary, and prevent you from viewing any images hosted on Imgur.com. We mean it.
John
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After receiving a less than pleasing email today from photobucket calling me a "naughty boy" for posting pics to a forum over a year ago, I will throw this into the ring.
I was a subscriber to RCScalebuilder in the US for a number of years and it worked extremely well. To actively participate and post photos, they asked for a subscription of US$20 per year, which I gladly paid for the many bits of advice, and shared experiences I got from the site.
I for one would happily do the same for this site. Moderators, over to you. It must be possible because this is one successful example of the system working.
The one thing I WILL NOT DO, is pay these parasitic hosting sites a ransom.
Cheers,
Ned
I was a subscriber to RCScalebuilder in the US for a number of years and it worked extremely well. To actively participate and post photos, they asked for a subscription of US$20 per year, which I gladly paid for the many bits of advice, and shared experiences I got from the site.
I for one would happily do the same for this site. Moderators, over to you. It must be possible because this is one successful example of the system working.
The one thing I WILL NOT DO, is pay these parasitic hosting sites a ransom.
Cheers,
Ned
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John
Thats buried in the T&C's about illegal activity and is easily overlooked, thanks for pointing it out. As you say moderators/admins can't be bothered to manage their forums then it their forum thats going to wither and die.
I also agree that you don't get owt for nowt so probably what is happening is inevitable, forums really should have their own storage capability . We'll see what eventuates
Pete
Thats buried in the T&C's about illegal activity and is easily overlooked, thanks for pointing it out. As you say moderators/admins can't be bothered to manage their forums then it their forum thats going to wither and die.
I also agree that you don't get owt for nowt so probably what is happening is inevitable, forums really should have their own storage capability . We'll see what eventuates
Pete
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It has occurred to me why moderators won't unlock posts. Its not practical, I'm guessing it’s about moderation, once a post has been moderated for content it then gets locked so the moderators don't need to go back to it. Otherwise, they'd have to re-moderate all the re-edited posts.
It’s up to the forum owners. If they want the forum to be a long-term reference source they need to give people the chance to fix this problem for them.
In order to ensure a reference source, the long-term solution should be that the forums invest in their own storage capacity rather than expect everybody to trump up $399/year to some third party who may or not be in business in 20years time. They need to take the lead and start on the business case, owning your own capacity would be less risk and far more cost effective for everybody. OK we may end up with some useless advertising but everybody is getting used to tuning out from that anyway.
Pete
It’s up to the forum owners. If they want the forum to be a long-term reference source they need to give people the chance to fix this problem for them.
In order to ensure a reference source, the long-term solution should be that the forums invest in their own storage capacity rather than expect everybody to trump up $399/year to some third party who may or not be in business in 20years time. They need to take the lead and start on the business case, owning your own capacity would be less risk and far more cost effective for everybody. OK we may end up with some useless advertising but everybody is getting used to tuning out from that anyway.
Pete
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