MIMF

I have been using Photobucket as my hosting site for pictures for quite some time.
Now, they want 399 American for one year to have the capability of 3rd party hosting.

What sites do you use?

Maybe I wasn't clear in my original question. I sometimes do that.

3rd party hosting is what they call it when you save your pics on one website, and link to them in another site, such as a forum like this one.
399.00 a year for that privilege is really steep. I'm looking for another site, other than Photobucket.

I just save my pictures on my computer, and upload them to MIMF when I want to post one. I've used another site, http://www.deviantart.com/ , which though certainly not strictly photographic , has allowed linking to external web sites, though you have to post the url with tags. I suppose it still works - here's a test:

Comet Lovejoy

And the green Comet blazes by the Pleiadies!

Peter, I did not know that I could upload directly to the forum. I also save my pictures on my computer, but thought I had to use a hosting site.
Can you explain to me how to do that?

Gordon, at the bottom of the page where you enter your replies, there is a button that says "Full Editor". Click that, and at the bottom of that page you will see a place for "Upload Attachment". the picture you want to upload will be your attachment. Click "Choose file", select the photo you want and add a comment if you would like. Then click Submit and that's it!

This is my first try.
SUCCESS!! Thanks!

Yessir, you got it! Cool guitar too.

I don't use third party sites for picture hosting on principle, which principle I forget just now but I'm sure there was one. Oddly, I do post pictures to facebook. It is apparently possible to link to facebook pictures for posting on forums that don't allow imbedded pictures (like the Acoustic Guitar Forum).

Using a third party site often results in photo links expiring after a few years for various reasons. This is why many old discussions no longer have photos but just dead links. Post them here and they will be permanent.

Thanks for the help guys! I have found many threads in a few different forums with dead links instead of pictures.
I don't know if Photobucket will kill all the links I currently have in this forum, but it's a fair bet they will.
It makes sense to be able to upload directly to the forum.

Gordon Bellerose wrote:I don't know if Photobucket will kill all the links I currently have in this forum, but it's a fair bet they will.

They will. They've killed mine.

Yep. Mine too.

They certainly did. Half the pictures in the Nashville Volunteer Work discussion, one of which I copied into my 20th Anniversary Contest thread, all disappeared a week or two ago. As you will see, they now display a box encouraging the owner to upgrade their account to allow 3rd party hosting.

I don't use any on-line picture sharing service, but I think that is a pretty low move, and an exorbitant price to fix it!

for those photos You do not want to download directly to some forum You might consider renting some webspace (or a (virtual) root server). Install an easy open source CMS (like CMSimple), a wiki or a blogging software and a gallery script and go ahead...

The internet needs more privately managed sites instead of all this commercial sites who want your data as well as Your money.

Anyway, as it comes to luthery i am usually a bit lazy and put my images to a "master forum" and link from there. In my case this is a German forum, but in therory this might be our site here as well as it is possible for guests to see alls the images (which i appreciate a lot).

Well, darn, guess I'm going to have to stop using photobucket.

I agree with the recommendation to upload directly to MIMF for all the stated reasons. If you're looking for an alternative to Flickr or Photobucket, you might want to look a Google Photos. If you have no philosophical objection to Google, they offer a free and unlimited cloud storage service. The only caveat is they will reformat the pictures to reduce their memory footprint, but without (in my experience) any loss in photo quality. This is a pic from my Google Photo account: