photo hosting site

[Ttrees]

I have not read this thread through, so sorry if I'm parroting someone else, but I have mentioned it before now.
I find it very frustrating when searching through archives, to see photos disappeared.
Its not only recently that this has being going on.

That's it,
I've made up my mind now.
I think its quite disregardful to use pictures from photo hosting sites.
I do understand that compressing piccys loses image quality, but you can always give a link to better resolution photos at
the end of your post.

Rant over
Tom

 

[MikeK]

I'm trying to close my PB account. Doesn't seem to be a click button to do this.

I just closed mine. Follow these instructions, and your account will be on its way to oblivion. You have 48 hours to change your mind; otherwise the account will be permanently deleted after seven days.

 

[MikeK]

I have not read this thread through, so sorry if I'm parroting someone else, but I have mentioned it before now.
I find it very frustrating when searching through archives, to see photos disappeared.
Its not only recently that this has being going on.

That's it,
I've made up my mind now.
I think its quite disregardful to use pictures from photo hosting sites.
I do understand that compressing piccys loses image quality, but you can always give a link to better resolution photos at
the end of your post.

Rant over
Tom

I'm confused about your two statements against using hosting sites and providing a link to a better photo. Aren't these the same thing?

Some discussion boards, such as UKWorkshop, allow members to upload images. However, the price of this free service is a smaller image.

When I owned a photography discussion board, I did not allow members to upload images because I would soon run out of server storage. Most of the displayed images were over 6MB, and there were hundreds of thousands throughout my website. Instead, I required all images to be hosted elsewhere and linked into the posts. This was not a problem because most of the members already used paid hosting sites, such as Smugmug, Zenfolio, or their own domains, to store and display their creative talent. These hosting sites also provided a point of sale feature for the photographers to sell their work. A few members used the free sites, such as Flickr and Photobucket, but they tended to be the exception.

As a photographer, I choose to retain full control of my images (at least the images I care about). Uploading to a discussion board usually results in me losing control, especially when there are time limits for editing posts. As long as my images are hosted offsite, I can break the link when I no longer want to share my images. I can't do this when the images are on a server I can't control or influence.

There are many reasons for older posts to have bad image links. In my experience, the most common reasons are people lose interest and let the hosting account close, they die and the accounts are closed, they reorganize their hosting site and inadvertently break the links, and so on. The recent change in Photobucket's terms of service for free accounts is just another reason.

 

[MattR]

I haven't tried this yet, as I don't have DropBox at work, but They have a free account, and you can share files from there. So that might work for some of you...

 

[AndyT]

I'm now back from my holidays and on a proper computer and broadband connection, not a phone.

I said I'd try some experiments and use "search and replace" to swap the old photobucket-related bits of the picture urls for text relating to a new host, with the same filenames.

As so many people suggested flickr, and 1TB of storage seems tempting, I had a go with that.

As an experiment, I have manually edited the images of the Howkins Plane instruction leaflet which I posted in this discussion:

post1156259.html#p1156259

which is the sort of information that might be useful long term to any tool collectors searching online - do say if you have any problems viewing them now.

HOWEVER, comparing the image filenames on flickr with the image filenames on photobucket, I see that flickr has assigned new filenames to all my images, just like photobucket did. Rats!

I can see the logic of this - they need globally unique names, not endless instances of DCM0001.jpg and suchlike. But it does mean I shan't be transferring all my old images there and bulk-editing old posts. I could probably get used to it for new stuff though, but I am reluctant to work two different ways and risk confusing myself.

Maybe my best bet is to find some affordable simple hosting for myself where I can just ftp up a whole folder of pictures for each of my old photobucket albums.

 

[Racers]

Just been playing with mine, you have to download the photos as a .zip file expand them and then store them somewhere on line, I have created another Flickr account but I am having trouble with permissions at the moment.

Pete

 

[Ttrees]

I wonder can these sites take your images and do what they want with them,
Like that... whats app "free calls but you give them rights to all your information app" ?

I went onto workbench design .net recently, now nearly all the bench links are gone :x
Never gonna use those sites.
Tom

 

[Racers]

Mine seems to be sorted now, the good thing is I have followed my self and reciprocated.
If you go to Flickr you should find two pete/Peter Maddex's one with 2000 pictures and one with 500.
I did update some of my shoulder plane wip but I have a lot more to do.

Pete

 

[AndyT]

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.

 

[memzey]

Well done that man! Is this macro something you'd be willing to share with others looking to do the same thing?

 

[AndyT]

Well done that man! Is this macro something you'd be willing to share with others looking to do the same thing?

No problem - if I do need to use it for real, I shall welcome any input from those who know what they are doing - I know there are lots of proper IT people round here!

Sub FixPhotoBucketPaths()
'
' This macro is to edit forum posts which refer to old image locations on photobucket.
' First step was to upload all photos to a new location online, using their old pb filenames
' and folders for each pb album
' The macro takes text copied from the forum editor window and pasted into Word, where the macro is run.


' It searches for the old and replaces with the new

'
' Define two text variables, the bit of the old path to be replaced and
' the text to replace it with.
Dim OldPath As String
Dim NewPath As String

' set the values for the variables. This could be done through a dialogue or selection box. Slightly complicated as I used 
' albums in pb, which will be folders on the new site.

OldPath = "http://i442.photobucket.com/albums/[insert old folder path here]"
NewPath = "http://[new url + folder path]"

' clear any formatting settings from previous uses of the Find and Replace dialogue,
' and run them over the whole text.

    Selection.WholeStory
        Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
    Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
    With Selection.Find
        .Text = OldPath
        .Replacement.Text = NewPath
                .Forward = True
        .Wrap = wdFindAsk
        .Format = False
        .MatchCase = False
        .MatchWholeWord = False
        .MatchWildcards = False
        .MatchSoundsLike = False
        .MatchAllWordForms = False
        
   ' this next line stops Word popping up a dialogue box asking if it should search the
   ' remainder of the document
        .Wrap = wdFindStop
    End With
    Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll

' select everything
  Selection.WholeStory
' and copy it back to the clipboard ready to paste into the forum editor
  Selection.Copy
  
    
End Sub

 

[CHJ]

Don't think anything can be done at Mod level with the macro solution, at least with current access rights.

I have edited a couple of threads where it was reasonably easy to access the images and upload them direct to the thread.

Could personally help with editing and changing links in individual threads to point to new source of hosting for desirable WIP threads.

Forum database search and replace would be down to Admin.

(I remember those early Word macros, it was a long time ago when PC Plus and PC Answers used to publish readers solutions to printing booklets and the like, had a few published before MS realised how unsafe it was to let anyone and everyone modify how their software worked.)

 

[AndyT]

Chas, I thought that global search and replace would be for admin rather than mods, but was hoping there is some way you can pass a request through to him.

After all, the sudden disappearance of thousands of images does make the site much less useful to anyone searching for information. Akin to spraypainting tags over all the pictures in a public gallery.

I don't use the latest version of Office, but as far as I know, VBA is still there, just a little less visible.

 

[AndyT]

Another quick update.

This afternoon I have bought some webspace of my own, and uploaded all my old photobucket albums to it.
It was really quite a painless process. The cost was far less than the absurd $300 demanded by photobucket and the job was not interrupted by endless adverts and offers to sell me mugs with pictures of kittens on. :roll:

I've also started working my way back through my old posts and have successfully edited pretty well everything this year which used to have photobucket-hosted pictures in, plus some sticky posts in the hand tool section, using the macro posted above.

I'll plug away at some more next time I feel lazy enough to sit and listen to 6Music for a while.

I need to work out something clever to cope with some of the image tags which had a preview image hyperlinked to the full image - if I can automate a way of simplifying them, I'll share it here.

So, if anyone else is thinking of doing something similar but is dithering - I urge you to take back control of what you do online.

 

[DiscoStu]

I've recently started using Google for my photo and video storage. There are limits on the quality, so no 4K video but ample for my needs and free. Google are unlikely to start charging as their whole business model is based around advertising.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[AndyT]

Good point about Google. It's fine for new pictures in new threads and I see that a number of posters are using it, but like Flickr, if you upload an image called say, dovetail.jpg, and share it, you get an unpredictable link something like https://photos.app.goo.gl/YgdrG65JGHJhNmm... - not your original filename.

I was not prepared to manually relink hundreds of pictures to new random urls. To make my old posts usable again, I needed a solution which would let me keep all the hundreds of old picture filenames as they were, and just change the static elements of the path to them. As I edit each post, the text which had been specific to the old hosting site is changed to new text which relates to the new hosting site.

 

[nabs]

the other disadvantage of google is that their user data storage solution (Google Drive) is not intended to be used as a web hosting solution, and this means that although you can create a shareable link that can be accessed by anyone, the link is not directly to an image file (which means you can't use it forums like this one) .

You can work around this - as I do - by converting the link to a direct link, but it is a bit of a faff (see crtlq.com for instance).

Incidentally, google do charge for storage, but they allow a level of free use, and separately you get unlimited use of google's photo backup storage (wiht limits on image size/quality):

https://www.google.com/drive/pricing/
https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6220791?hl=en

 

[DiscoStu]

sorry guys I was just saying I've started using it for free storage not for preserving my links in threads. I use tapatalk for 99.9% of my forum browsing and posting and use it for images as:

1 It's easy to use and no need to add in the HTML code

2 It's free

3 I mainly have my photos on my phone so they're easy to find and add.

I don't know where the images get store if it's on the forum or on tapatalk. Never bothered to worry to find out.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[ColeyS1]

sorry guys I was just saying I've started using it for free storage not for preserving my links in threads. I use tapatalk for 99.9% of my forum browsing and posting and use it for images as:

1 It's easy to use and no need to add in the HTML code

2 It's free

3 I mainly have my photos on my phone so they're easy to find and add.

I don't know where the images get store if it's on the forum or on tapatalk. Never bothered to worry to find out.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I've often wondered the same. If it gets stored with tapatalk and they were to change things, it'd be carnage !

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

 

[AndyT]

I've had a quick look at the Tapatalk website. It doesn't say much about image hosting, nothing in the faq.
Digging into their own support forums, it seems that image hosting is on Tapatalk servers by default, but if a forum owner pays for the premium tier plugin, they can choose to divert uploaded images to their forum's own servers instead.