all my threads with photos attached from january 2017 and earlier are messed up!

[gittarasaurus]

i have been looking around at some old threads and have found that many of the photos i have attached to posts here have disappeared. there is some text where the pics used to be but it is not a usable link. it seems that from january 2017 and earlier they have mostly vanished. 

i have always used shutterfly as my hosting site and they recently changed some of the terms of service. maybe that has something to do with it, i don't know. my recently posted photos are still showing.

i have found a few old threads that still have photos i attached. i don't know why some are lost and others not. over time, i will try to patch up what i can. if somebody finds any threads with no pics, let me know and i'll try to fix those first (only my photos, i don't know about anyone else's photos).

[Barry]

Bummer!  
Some of us have had similar problems with other hosting sites.

Many have had their images deleted entirely while others, like me, have had PhotoBucket change their terms of agreement and put a limit on the number of images you can host for free.

Everything else above that limit is blurred out and/or has a watermark over it. It's buggered up a lot of sites like ours which depend on having a historical record of their models.

I switched to Servimg some time ago, which is still free, and which is part of Forumotion, the company which hosts this forum site.

So far it's been reliable and I can recommend it for anyone looking to switch.

[Barry]

Mike, I see what you mean.
I had a look at the code behind one of your "messed up" posts.

Although the URL's are still there, when I copied them out and tried to bring up the images I got a "404 Not Found " error message from their server.

Looks like they've either moved them, or deleted them!  
Sorry buddy.

[gittarasaurus]

i have my own archive of all photos (3TB hard drive) so whatever they do, i will not lose all my photos. i actually have many, many more that are not loaded to shutterfly. i just use shutterfly so i can post pics on the forum.

shutterfly has not deleted my photos, because i can still see them at the main site. they must have changed something on their side that changed the way the forum can access the photos. the main thing they changed in the TOS was that you must buy something at least once every 18 months or the account will be deleted. that is cheap and easy to do, a mug or a mouse pad, christmas cards, anything is good enough. but there is still some risk of losing the photos.

i looked at the link to servimg. the one catch is, according to their TOS, that any image that is not accessed for 5yrs will be deleted, so not totally ideal for a long term archive.

i tried using my online cloud server but the links are time limited to one month, so NFG either.

i'm not sure what is the best "permanent" solution at this point. it is a shame that the forum itself cannot host photos directly, even if it costs more to maintain, at least the whole thing is in one place. i don't know if that is practical economically. or how one could collect all the images posted in the past. i'm sure i'm not the only one to have old posts disrupted by a photo hosting site. a real bummer to lose all that great content.


i don't know. i guess we will eventually go the way of the dinosaurs.

>walking in your footsteps<

[Barry]

Happy to hear you have your own archive of all your images, that's the smart thing to do. Relying on a third party to host them for free is wishful thinking really.

When I was running our website I was aware of trying, as much as possible, to link to the forum discussion threads related to the posts, to keep everything in sync, especially the restorations and mods.

Sadly, the current webmaster seems uninterested in maintaining it and the state of the website too has become an unreliable reference and resource, and is largely unusable.

[gittarasaurus]

having read through the terms of service at Shutterfly more thoroughly i found another provision, that in order to host photos free of charge, each account holder must purchase something at least once every 18 months. it does not require a minimum spending amount, only that something is purchased.

so to make sure to have them continue to host my photos...

[Barry]

Way to go!

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