Photo Hosting

[TimB]

I had several hundred photo's hosted on a site that got a virus about a year ago - it seems to have totally crashed now. I need a new location to host photo's. Do you use any of the free photo hosting sites? Good ones? Bad ones? I have some space I could use to host them myself but don't really have the time to get all that set up correctly.

[4RUNAMOK]

I have a pro-am photographer site that I use, called www.Smugmug.com (http://www.Smugmug.com). It's $30/year, and fast, well worth it. Every free site out there compresses the quality right out of my photos. Smugmug does not.

Otherwise, there is webshots.com, flikr, Google's Picasa, photobucket, plenty of them.

[JackSilb]

Tim,

You are welcome to use ours (http://www.4wdtrips.net/forum/showthread.php?t=4949).

It will cost you as much as you pay to use the Forum and will have the same amount of pop-up(s) and advertisement -> 0+0 = 0.
Just let me know once you register. I have to approve the accounts manually for security reasons.

Every free site out there compresses the quality right out of my photos. Smugmug does not.
Since you mentioned it, I just changed our settings. Now we keep it 100% quality. That is one advantage to host our own servers.

If /when we start to run out of disk space we can run a donation program to get more disks.
-JACK

[JackSilb]

What is the max size pictures you usually upload? Pixel and file size.
I usually don't use more than 1024 x 768 on web pictures. ~ 200 K bytes.
I need to set a limit on our Photogallery 2 software.
I want to make sure I have your needs in mind.

Thanks,
-JACK

[Spike Pretorius]

Mmmmm. I think I must follow this up. Over time I've lost interest in using photo galleries because of the limits and hassles involved. So my photos gather dust on a usb harddrive on my desk.
If I know that long term they are safe here then it's worth the effort to load up.
Is there a size limit per member?

Jack I also vaguely remember that last year sometime there was a beef about photo posting. What is your preferred mothod of posting photos here?
Uploading an attachment
Linking a photo
Posting a link to a photo gallery
Posting here in your gallery.

Sorry if these are lame questions but I haven't been following photo threads for quite a while

[JackSilb]

Good questions. The general user already have 2 gigabytes of storage on the Photo Gallery 2. That will give space for thousands of ~200K bytes size picture.
Let me see if I am doing this right:
1 K bytes = 1024 bytes
2 G bytes= 2147483648 bytes = 2097152 K bytes
Assuming an average picture will take up to 200 K bytes
2097152 / 200 = 10,485.76 ~ 10.5 thousands pictures.

Huh!?, that seems a lot. Did I do this right?
If I did this right, I better limit to 1G bytes of storage initially.

On the preferable method to use question.
This is more for keeping the Forum clean than anything else. For example, when people link to pictures outside the Forum and the site goes down for one reason or another the link breaks, the post in the Forum gets broken.

I would say if people can upload the pictures to a post on the Forum we will be safer. For 10 pictures p/ post that will work without giving the user much work. For a trip gallery with dozens to hundred of pictures people should use a photo gallery and post the link.

Also, while back people were linking dozens and dozens of pictures in a post. They take a long time to load. It affect the experience of people using the slower Internet connections. The thumbnails are quicker to load. People can click on them to see the larger pictures.

But, not rules is some times good. If people already have their pictures elsewhere and like just to link them, we will be happy to see them. Above I meant to propose some guidelines not rules.
How is that?
-JACK

[Spike Pretorius]

Cool. That's cleared it up for me

[JackSilb]

Give it a try we will help as needed.
Just let me know when you register.

-JACK