Photo sharing - some thoughts on future-proofing

[kquiggle]

This post was prompted by another all too frequent experience of looking at an older post and finding that all the photo links are broken (seems to happen most often with Photobucket, but I've seen it with other photo sharing sites as well).

Why does this happen?

• Terms of service changes (Photobucket)
• Photos removed from site by owner (don't know why anyone would do this - maybe need to remove old photos to make room for new ones)
• Site went out of business
• Site was purchased, URLs changed
• Site was personal web server, no longer maintained
• Various other reasons

How to prevent this? I don't think there is any sure-fire way, but here are some suggestions:

• Post to a site maintained by a substantial business organization, which is not likely to go out of business
• Do not post to sites which remove or expire accounts for lack of use
• Post only to free sites, so that files are not removed for non-payment
• Post to a site with generous free space requirements
• Last resort: Post to a site which allows (and makes it easy) for you to download all your photos and re-post elsewhere if necessary (doesn’t prevent dead links, but at least your photos will not be lost)

For the above reasons (as well as other reasons specific to me), I use Google's picasaweb, but there are a number of other sites which would do just as well.


Which photo sharing site do you use, and why?


P.S.


Wikipedia has a list of photo sharing sites if you want to do some comparison shopping (note the Wikipedia list is incomplete).

 

[Admin]

Since taking over we have enabled direct attachment uploading so if an image gets attached directly to the post and thus hosted here on HMEM it will never go down.

 

[Swifty]

How do we directly attach photo's, can we just drag and drop?

Paul.

 

[Tin Falcon]

when you open the rely to thread window below the main window you will see a post icons block . below that is a aditional options window. second block down is a selection entitles attach files and a manage attachments soft button click on the soft button and a window will popup and you can upload files either from your computer or url/ web hostng site.
hope this helps.
Tin

 

[Swifty]

Thanks Tin, I understand all that, makes it easy.

Paul.

 

[kquiggle]

Just to experiment, here is a photo from picasaweb copied and pasted; this appears to insert an image link:

and the same photo uploaded (via the attachments option) from picasaweb. For the attachment option, I was able to select a small size photo (an option in picasaweb: thumbnail, small, medium, original size).

Edited to add a third image by drag and drop (should be the same as copy and paste):

Result:

Image as attachment: Results in embedded image in HIMEM
Image from drag/drop or copy/paste: Results in link to image source



​