Lately, I have been annoyed by the Photobucket photo hosting site that they want money to contribute my uploading photo for site I post with off topic subject or related lighting in general without blurring the picture with their watermarking.

To make the subject worse, the web site is extremely resourceful hog especially for the slow computer I still use.

I would like to know a recommended photo hosting site that are free to use without their watermarking when I post some off topic subject here.

Be careful of a lot of these sites, as they will claim ownership of your photos and distribute them or sell them as they see fit. I used to have a LOT of photos on Flickr, but I pulled them all when they announced they were selling the site to another company and the terms/conditions were changing to give them the right to do what they  wanted with MY photos. Not going to happen. At least I know that on LG nobody is going to make money from my photos.

It's worth paying for a good service if you can find one that still lets you retain ownership of your images. I don't know of any, but then I haven't been looking.

It is acceptable for things that dont contain secret information (duh), would be worthless and not-abusable outside the intentions for which they were originally uploaded, and their long term availability doesn't matter

In the general case i dont think anyone there have any use to do with pics of streetlights, especially in non identifiable locations. However many forum discussions and small unmaintained websites from the 00's that were full of pictures and great resources for years after, were destroyed forever by imageshack and their likes when they removed or blocked old pictures

Host them yourself on a synology nas.

Host them yourself on a synology nas.

Doing that means you'd have to open up firewall ports to be able to access them from elsewhere, also it leaves you vulnerable if your place catches on fire and everything goes up in smoke. I do have a couple of NAS drives for file storage and backups, but everything essential is stored offline in Dropbox and Idrive, amongst other places. Nobody from outside my firewall can even tell my system exists, it gets a perfect stealth rating here 

Doing that means you'd have to open up firewall ports to be able to access them from elsewhere, also it leaves you vulnerable if your place catches on fire and everything goes up in smoke. I do have a couple of NAS drives for file storage and backups, but everything essential is stored offline in Dropbox and Idrive, amongst other places. Nobody from outside my firewall can even tell my system exists, it gets a perfect stealth rating here 

If you use a synology account or zerotier firewall configuration is unnecessary. I am about to have one (synology) at home and another at my place of work. I’m tired of playing the SaaS game with silly-con valley.

If you use a synology account or zerotier firewall configuration is unnecessary. I am about to have one (synology) at home and another at my place of work. I’m tired of playing the SaaS game with silly-con valley.

Possibly, but I don't like letting anything from outside into my system. I do use Dropbox for some of the essentials such as OS configuration files and other things that would be difficult to retrieve in the event of a serious system failure, but opening up the firewall (whether by manual configuration or otherwise) isn't going to happen.

When I used to do some work at home, the company had a VPN tunnel into their network, so there was no way anything from their end could see my local drives.

Possibly, but I don't like letting anything from outside into my system. I do use Dropbox for some of the essentials such as OS configuration files and other things that would be difficult to retrieve in the event of a serious system failure, but opening up the firewall (whether by manual configuration or otherwise) isn't going to happen.

When I used to do some work at home, the company had a VPN tunnel into their network, so there was no way anything from their end could see my local drives.

I agree about letting others on the lan and I do on occasion use Dropbox for work myself though I don’t have an account with them.

Regarding vpn’s zerotier is a very advanced and powerful vpn that is open source. It’s quite fun to play with and has allowed me remote access to many different computers no matter where they are in the world as long as internet access is available with only initial configuration needed. It’s not necessarily for the application discussed here, but cool.

A VPN is just a tunnel for network traffic, it does not mean that the trusted party is automatically blcoked from doing malicious stuff... It also does not protect anything other than the data sent through the VPN in the first place - You can still be attacked outside the VPN or your computer can send data outside the VPN

Your defense is down to your system configuration - 1. What services you run and 2. What rules you set in your firewall

I stopped using Photobucket, although I used to. But I hate how they made all the pictures blurry, plus their site makes the computer run really slow. I think it's filled with ads and maybe other things that cause problems.

Makes computer slow = Site full of javascript (and things based on it JSON, AJAX, etc) written by some web developers who somehow think they are entitled to all your cpu power

Most of the time the javascript in question is for some self-updating content on the page (running an infinite loop), that might be ads but could also be any "improved user experience" sort of stuff like self updating text or code that loads more content as you get to the bottom of the page

Disable javascript and see what stops working in that website... A well built, non "web 2.0" website will work the same or at most have only some minor broken featuers

Thanks for the insight, Ash.

I'll will experiment with this Photobucket using Microsoft Edge to see how it behaves.

Photobucket was good back in their early days. They basically ruined the site (as so many companies do) with 'upgrades'.
Then it became a pay-site...which made it totally worthless, I went and deleted everything I had there after that. (but left my dead/empty account, which who knows may still exist. I should try logging in sometime just to see .lol. )

It would be nice to find a good free image host.

This topic has been moved from General Lighting Discussions to Off Topic.