How To Post Photos & Where To Store Them

[Wandering Daisy]

I am not going to pay the outrageous fee of $400 a year to Photobucket for third party posting. Thus, bye-bye photos in trip reports, for now. Any suggestions? If I transfer photos to another site, do I have to re-load every photo in past reports?

[ERIC]

If you hotlinked them and then delete the source account, yes, unfortunately you do. As discussed above, the alternative is to add your photos here as attachments. Doing so ensures they will show up no matter what.

[Wandering Daisy]

I tried the attach method. It does work. I will use this with new trip reports but replacing photos in old reports will go slowly- a cold winter's day project!

[ERIC]

I know, total PITA! Please let me know if there's anything I can do to help.

[ERIC]

Another (potential) option for those with some tech know-how and a willingness to invest a bit up front, Network Assisted Storage (NAS) might be something to consider. Synology is a good brand with a fairly straight forward operating system. Like with Google Photos, Flickr, DropBox and other hosting services, you store all of your media in one place (in this case, on your own NAS device at home or work) and then set permissions differently only for what you want to share. You can change permissions for only one photo, or, for entire albums/folders. To embed a photo, you grab the source URL and insert it using the img or rimg BBCode like normal. Just tested this method on HST with the "Photo Station" app on my Synology NAS and it works perfectly. Security and/or bandwidth limits might be an issue depending upon the model of NAS you employ and security settings. That part I've not tested. Do your research first.

P.S. I have a DS414 with 2x 4TB and 2x 2TB hardd drives. With the proprietary Synology RAID I net nearly 8TB of storage with full redundancy. As I need more storage, I simply replace the smaller drives with larger ones.

[Wandering Daisy]

To add insult to injury, now my Photoshop Elements 10 will not work after the latest Microsoft update.

Evidently you can reload Photoshop but then it will not work again after the next Microsoft windows update.

So, I am looking at getting another photo processing program. There are things about Elements that I am not that fond of. Any ideas of another software that does not cost more than about $200?

[wildhiker]

I should point out that you don't need to use an explicit "photo sharing" website to store photos. You can also get your own domain and web hosting service and load folders of photos yourself. For years, I have hosted my own domain with 1and1.com which gives me about 50 GB storage for $7/month. I also get to make numerous special purpose email addresses. I can then create folders in my web storage area and fill them with photos and link to them. I prefer to pay for my own domain than put up with the loss of privacy, ads, and random changes in service from "free" services.
-Phil

[SSSdave]

Testing the image attachment feature resizing with a 500x400 pixel jpg:

Attachments...Add files...
browse
...Place inline

SC08373-08426-5x1vcr.jpg (123.4 KiB) Viewed 479 times

I then used my Windows 10 Snipping Tool to capture the resulting forum display and instead of a 500 pixel wide image it had been enlarged to about 950 pixels or twice its size that of course reduces the visual sharpness by spreading out the detail. I've noticed this behavior since Eric added this feature so only tend to use it for informational images and usually bother to reduce the size of whatever by 50% to reduce the softness however the original if displayed as input would be sharper. Preferably the tool would not change image dimensions.

[rlown]

Except, sometimes you get a blank status bar and no "place inline" button, even though it uploaded.

[richlong8]

Would someone verify for me that this photo can be seen. I copied the link to Google Drive where my photos are stored, and inserted it using rimg.
thanks, Richard