I recently upgraded a little to allow basecamp in the truck for day hikes. Bought this for $60 on Craigslist. Works well and keeps the bugs out. Setup is about 10 minutes.
Registered: 02/05/03
Posts: 3292
Loc: Portland, OR
GrumpyGord, your pics aren't showing up. Photobucket no longer allows hotlinking unless you pony up a large sum of money for the privilege. All I am seeing are boilerplate graphics from Photobucket demanding its ransom money.
That is strange. They were showing when I posted it and now even the previous pictures are not showing. It cannot be because I have too many. I only have six pictures in the account and I thought that it was only a problem when you had a lot of pictures. I guess that you will have to take my word for it that it is a nice setup.
Registered: 02/07/07
Posts: 3917
Loc: Ozark Mountains in SW Missouri
Wow, that seems odd that neither of those services let you display photos with a url.
I dinked around with the google link and it doesn't provide a way to do that. It will let me download it, and copy it, and share a link, but not embed the image with an html tag that points to their site.
One reason would be that they don't want to pay for the bandwidth to deliver it to a 3rd party site, but it seems like they could attach a small ad easy enough to make a profit on that so I really don't get it unless it's because they make more on tracking who's viewing it than they do on advertising on it and that has some suspicious connotations connected with it.
Registered: 02/05/03
Posts: 3292
Loc: Portland, OR
Yup. It's been a decade or more since I last heard anyone reference Google's original 'motto': Don't be evil. Seems like they tossed that idea overboard back when they discovered the enormous profits to be made by doing evil.
So. Any ideas on what will display images instead of just a link? Photos are not a big thing for me but it would be nice to actually see an image. Most folks just won't bother.
Registered: 02/07/07
Posts: 3917
Loc: Ozark Mountains in SW Missouri
From Photobucket:
Quote:
Need to share images to other websites?
Upgrade to our Plus 500 plan for $399.99 a year That's Just over $1 a day!
Holy Moly!!!
I know I can make an app as good or maybe even better than theirs and charge half of what they're charging, and let you link your images to display here and on other sites (like Facebook).
I've written almost all the code to do it already. It'd probably only take me a few weeks to get it up and running.
I ran some numbers on my costs. If I can get 5 people to sign up for $30 a year I can give you each 50GB of storage and 200,000 MB of downloads per month (uploads are free). I seriously doubt anyone here will hit anything close to 200,000 MB of downloads, but I get 1TB per month with each 250GB block of storage I buy so that's we have to work with.
I can buy storage in blocks now (this is new), and I'll know soon if I get any discount on larger blocks, but that's already a pretty great deal and I'll pass on any discounts on larger blocks. There are other costs involved (app server, database server, email server, etc) but I already built and pay for those to run and won't incur any additional cost to use them with this app.
If you don't find anything better let me know and I'll build the app.
I used to use SmugMug. They charge $6/month ($4/mth if billed annually) for their basic plan, and you can share on other sites at no additional cost. Never had an issue with them at all, I could easily recommend them (I have no relationship with SmugMug, just a once happy customer).
Registered: 05/19/14
Posts: 182
Loc: Central Illinois near Springfi...
I have been using pbase.com for some years. My account is $23 per year for 2GB of storage and includes linking. I usually resize my images to around 1000 pixels on the long side before uploading. I think that one of the reasons that Photobucket dropped free linking is the size of the image files. Pbase offers linking to different image sizes. I haven't paid much attention to what those different sizes are.
Registered: 02/07/07
Posts: 3917
Loc: Ozark Mountains in SW Missouri
Yeah, the newer cameras take some pretty fat file size photos. There's server side software you can use to resize them after they're uploaded, and you can compressed them too. You obviously lose quality when you downsize/compress the image, but you can do it 'on the fly" so you don't need to store all the different sizes.
You can't really compress images the same as you do text files, i.e, with "zip" compression. You can either make them smaller in dimensions (take an 8"X10" and make it 4"x5"), or lower the quality of the image (which blurs it up).
I'm still interested in looking into this some more. I'll keep looking into the numbers and if I can do significantly better on pricing I might rough out an app just to get a feel for what's needed.
Registered: 05/19/14
Posts: 182
Loc: Central Illinois near Springfi...
I generally use Photoshop or Irfanview to resize images and I work in the number of pixels along the edge. When I resize an image of 4000 X 3000 pixels to 1000 X 750 pixels, the number of pixels is reduced from 12,000,000 to 750,000 or 1/16 of the original number. The image quality is not degraded to the point where it can be seen on most computer displays. The screen that I am looking at right now has a resolution of 1280 X 800 pixels, so a file with 1000 pixels on the long edge could be around 3/4 of the display size without degradation. The file size is considerably smaller even with .jpg, which is compressed anyway. The biggest problem with resizing images is the time and effort that it takes to do it. I would expect that there is batch software that can do this, but I usually like to crop and correct contrast and brightness before resizing. I don't think of image size in inches until I print one. This was true even with film. The grain on film was usually fine enough to allow considerable enlargement without noticeable loss of quality. Another advantage of resizing is that if someone steals your image, the quality will never be as good as your original. Image theft isn't a big deal for most people, but it can be.
Registered: 01/16/13
Posts: 913
Loc: Nacogdoches, TX, USA
Originally Posted By GrumpyGord
So. Any ideas on what will display images instead of just a link? Photos are not a big thing for me but it would be nice to actually see an image. Most folks just won't bother.
I'm pretty sure you can still do this with Flickr. It used to be easier, but now it's kind of hidden to discourage it. I have to remind myself how every time.
_________________________
The journey is more important than the destination.
So. Any ideas on what will display images instead of just a link? Photos are not a big thing for me but it would be nice to actually see an image. Most folks just won't bother.
I'm pretty sure you can still do this with Flickr. It used to be easier, but now it's kind of hidden to discourage it. I have to remind myself how every time.
I tried it with Flickr but it just gave a link. Maybe I did not try the correct method. I very seldom take photos so it is not a big deal. Occasionally I want to post a photo to a group like this. A couple of other groups I am a member of permit direct posting so that is not a problem.
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