Slitherine

In order to include a photo or other image in a post it needs to be linked from a site where the image is hosted. Images incidentally include those nicely presented tables showing Runners and Riders and tournament results. Many of us have been using Photobucket for this purpose. However, Photobucket have decided that in future they will not allow "Third Party Hosting" (their definition for what we're doing) from free accounts. The only way to continue to use this function on Photobucket is to upgrade to a Plus500 account at $39.99 a month. I won't be doing that!

This raises 2 issues. Firstly existing images are likely to disappear. But also it's going to be harder to add images to posts in future. So, does anyone know of an alternative to Photobucket that will allow 3rd Party Hosting on a free account?

I've not used it myself, but in other forums where this has been raise, the main recommendation seems to be Imjur.com. This was also raised on a MSE request for help.

Don

Hi Kevin- Interesting. I see that all my linked photos in this forum have all now been taken down by Photobucket and replaced by the "you need to upgrade your account" notice although I haven't had an email from them. I have not been active on Photobucket since I posted the Roll Call results in April. Equally all yours still seem to be up (assuming all are photo bucket), but I expect they will have removed the functionality to upload more unless you pay the generous $399pa upgrade fee!

Don

Thanks Don. I'll look into Imjur. I've also wondered if it's possible to link to a Public Dropbox folder.

Blogger might also be an option. It then gives you a few more options in terms of formatting , adding words around the images and also general search-friendliness.



if there a picture of a helicopter here, followed by 2 F16s then linking to images hosted on blogger seems to work

Great thought Tim - do you need a blog though to connect from? i.e. do you post to your blog on blogger and then embed the image to a 3rd party site?

Don

quackstheking wrote:Great thought Tim - do you need a blog though to connect from? i.e. do you post to your blog on blogger and then embed the image to a 3rd party site?

Don

You create a "blog" but then what you post to it is up to you.if you only post photos, that's fine - Google are already benefitting from traffic to It. If it's just photos, that your call.

Given it's owned by Google, the chances of it becoming a "paid" service in future strike me as being pretty low - for Google, each page is searchable content, so they can monetise it anyway

Blogger hosts the images - you can LINK TO blogger from a 3rd part site, or vise versa.

Both the images I posted are hosted on Blogger

If people are referring to imgur.com as a substitute, please note they were hacked but both admitted it and took speedy action to respond/resolve. About as good as you get in the digital world today.