An update on my experiments, and a question for the mods/Charlie.
I've applied wet flannels to my fevered brow and revisited my lost knowledge of Word VBA macros. (I know it's not proper programming, but it's as close as I have ever got, or care to get.)
It wasn't too hard and I'm now able to easily edit an old post and fix the links that used to point to Photobucket, and make them point to a new location online. As a test, I have borrowed some space and uploaded just a few photos, as a test, using the same filenames they had before. The borrowed space does not have the spare capacity I would need for everything. It is enough, however, to show that my approach does work. I think that having my own webspace, under my control, is the best way ahead.
So now I can go to an old post, click the edit button, then Ctrl A, to select all, Ctrl C to copy, and Ctrl V to paste into an empty Word document, Ctrl 8 to run the macro, and Ctrl V to paste the results back into the forum editor, then click on Submit.
Three mouse clicks and five keystrokes. Not too bad, and it reduces the task to mindless drudgery that can be done while listening to the radio.
I'm on the point of buying some webspace of my own to host my 500Mb stash of photos. I'm considering the smallest option at Heart Internet - about £50 a year for my own domain name, 5GB of space and 30 GB bandwidth per month.
But realistically, I'm not going to manually edit all of my posts that have pictures, even working as efficiently as I can. I'm willing to do it for anything I refer back to myself, for sizeable projects and for stickies, but I don't really relish doing the lot.
But if I find a new home for all the pictures, 'doing the lot' looks like something that could be done much more simply at the UKW end of things.
So my question is this - given that I only need a search and replace for text within the urls of the pictures, is there a way that a mod can do that search and replace within the forum's database? Being totally ignorant of PHPBB, that sounds like a simple job!
(It's actually about 18 similar search and replace operations, as each of my old photobucket albums will become a folder on any new website, but the principle is the same.)
If the answer to that question is Yes, then I would be willing to stump up for the storage required.