Smugmug Acquires Flickr

[Scott5114]

I also use imgur for quick uploads to internet forums. I hope imgur doesn't end up the same way as imageshack. Apparently imgur is heavily used by reddit users, which may give it some credentials to stay around. Image hosting costs a ton of money and advertising doesn't generate that much revenue for such services.

I think imgur is safe, at least under current ownership, because it was started by a Reddit user who wanted to make an image hosting service ideal for use on things like Reddit. It actually has its own social-media aspect to it–images can be submitted to the public and then upvoted and downvoted, same as on Reddit.

[Hot Rod Hootenanny]

Just reading this thread made me wonder.  Do people maintain local copies of their images even after uploading to flickr (or something else?)  I don't upload much of my image collection, but I maintain a local copy (and backup) of everything.  I'm curious what others do.

Back in my heyday of running roadfan.com I had three copies of my road photos. Print copies, digital copies on disks (then CD-ROMS), and the website.
Now in the digital age, I try to have two digital copies of my photos, one on my laptop, the other on an external hard drive. This goes along with whatever photos I post on FB.

[SSOWorld]

time to begin the process of downloading and deleting as I feel leery about smug snake

[Max Rockatansky]

I have storage backups that I use for my photos:

-  My old laptop
-  A terrabyte drive
-  A box of flash drives

I'm at about 60,000 photos and have about 46,000 of them on Flickr.  Last year I put a lot of effort into reorganizing my photos and heavily edited my albums from prior to 2014 when I didn't have very much skill at photo taking.

[Roadrunner75]

What's the consensus on safest place to put photos for now?  I only have a handful that I've ever uploaded for here - partially because I'm too lazy to go through the process - and that was at Photobucket.  I don't need a social media experience or voting or a place to upload my Christmas photos - Just something simple to get a direct link for the forum.  I saw Imgur above.  I was thinking of trying out Flickr but...

[Scott5114]

Honestly, if you have no strong feelings about keeping your rights to your photos, a good option is to license them under a free license and upload them to Wikimedia Commons.

Pros:

• No bandwidth or size restrictions.
• Reliable servers.
• Will always remain free, operated by a non-profit.
• Because all the images are licensed freely, they are backed up to a number of other archival sites.
• If someone likes your photos, they can show up in places you wouldn't expect. This usually means Wikipedia articles, but I had a photo I took of the Grandview Triangle end up in an article in the Kansas City Star.

Cons:

• If someone likes your photos, they can show up in places you wouldn't expect. You won't get any royalties. (I had no idea the KC Star ran my photo until someone pointed it out to me, and of course I got no money for it. But if I were charging, they'd probably just send one of their photographers out to the same spot and I wouldn't get anything anyway.)
• You have no absolute control over the images, meaning:
  
  
  
  • Other people might edit or crop your images and you have no special say over it as the original author.
  • There's always the small chance that your photos will be deleted. However, Commons tends toward hoarding images. Even if they have questionable use to the Wikipedia project, the default assumption is that it's considered a good idea to keep them around, so long as they're freely licensed.
  • If you want your photo deleted, people may argue against its deletion and prevent it from getting deleted.
    
• There are policies to read over. These are not content policies (i.e. not excluding types of content), and are mostly straightforward. A basic knowledge of US copyright law is assumed.
• If something is mis-tagged, an overly anal copyright hawk or bot may sometimes try to get it deleted, rather than just fixing the tags. (There are roadgeeks that you can reach out to for help in such situations, and they will generally be happy to help defend road content against unwarranted deletion.)
• There is no built-in generator for BBCode markup. It is trivial to get an appropriately-sized thumbnail and add the image tags, but the imgur tag generator does save a few moments worth of effort.

[MNHighwayMan]

I had never thought of using the Commons as a hosting service before. That's kind of brilliant, in its own way, but at the same time, it almost feels like abuse of the system.

[Scott5114]

I had never thought of using the Commons as a hosting service before. That's kind of brilliant, in its own way, but at the same time, it almost feels like abuse of the system.

As long as you're fine with freely licensing it, Commons is fine with you using their hosting. You get a reliable host, they get a free image to add to their collection (and maybe use to illustrate a Minnesota road article). It's a win-win.

[MNHighwayMan]

I had never thought of using the Commons as a hosting service before. That's kind of brilliant, in its own way, but at the same time, it almost feels like abuse of the system.

As long as you're fine with freely licensing it, Commons is fine with you using their hosting. You get a reliable host, they get a free image to add to their collection (and maybe use to illustrate a Minnesota road article). It's a win-win.

To be honest, I'm kind of honored when someone uses one of my road pictures for something (has happened once!). All I care about is being credited–I take these pictures as a hobby, not as a way to try and make money.

Maybe I'll look into making an account and uploading some stuff...

[hbelkins]

Facebook is a free, reliable service for image hosting. I've been uploading my recent photos both to Flickr and Facebook.

For those of you who are concerned over privacy issues -- and I'm not one of them, because there is nothing that I could have seen on Facebook that would have affected my vote in the 2016 election in any way -- you can choose to share what you want with Facebook. You don't have to fill out current city or job or anything like that. Start your personal account and create a page, and upload your photos there.

[US71]

Facebook is a free, reliable service for image hosting. I've been uploading my recent photos both to Flickr and Facebook.

For those of you who are concerned over privacy issues -- and I'm not one of them, because there is nothing that I could have seen on Facebook that would have affected my vote in the 2016 election in any way -- you can choose to share what you want with Facebook. You don't have to fill out current city or job or anything like that. Start your personal account and create a page, and upload your photos there.

Don't they resize them? Would you have a problem if Mark Zuckerberg suddenly decided he owned everything?  That's why I don't post my best shots there, only runners up.

[briantroutman]

For those of you who are concerned over privacy issues...You don't have to fill out current city or job or anything like that.

In my estimation, the amount of information you voluntarily provide–and the value of that information–is trivial compared with the enormous dossier that Facebook can assemble based on snooping on your activity. Sure, you can choose to not to list your current city on your Facebook profile, but it's of little significance since Facebook already knows exactly where you live, where you work, what route you take to work, what fast food restaurant you stop at on the way home, etc.

I'm not insinuating that Facebook is trying to do anything nefarious to any one person with his/her data, but if you're an end user of Facebook, you have to realize that you aren't Facebook's customer; advertisers are Facebook's customers. Any service that they provide to you is incidental to making money through advertisers, and if there's any way they can make a buck by selling the information they've amassed on you and drafting end user agreements that aren't in your best interests, they will.

I think we can all agree that you should always keep a backup copy and never trust any one service to offload photos (or any other digital assets)–just in case that company goes bankrupt, suddenly changes its policies, or whatever. What I'm more concerned with is the issue of embedded links–and all of the intellectual capital that is in a sense destroyed when links to images are broken. If Smugmug suddenly disables Flickr's image embedding, I can imagine that lots of photo-intensive AARoads threads would be rendered useless.

Perhaps the only reasonably durable solution would be to maintain your own system of redirects on a domain that you control. But unless you had some way of automating the process, it would be quite tedious to set up and update if you migrated photos from service to service.

[hbelkins]

Sure, you can choose to not to list your current city on your Facebook profile, but it's of little significance since Facebook already knows exactly where you live, where you work, what route you take to work, what fast food restaurant you stop at on the way home, etc.

That's not Facebook. That's Google.

[freebrickproductions]

The only problem with Facebook is, IIRC, the image links tend to go dead after a while.

I always keep local copies of my stuff, so when Flickr goes down, I won't lose anything. Only issue would be posting things on this forum, as there isn't any way to upload attachments (all of the other forums I'm on have this option).

[bandit957]

Facebook is a free, reliable service for image hosting. I've been uploading my recent photos both to Flickr and Facebook.

But wouldn't people need a Facepoo account to see it?

[vdeane]

Sure, you can choose to not to list your current city on your Facebook profile, but it's of little significance since Facebook already knows exactly where you live, where you work, what route you take to work, what fast food restaurant you stop at on the way home, etc.

That's not Facebook. That's Google.

While those specific examples are more Google's forte, Facebook does engage in such tracking too.  Recently there was a scandal over their phone app downloading people's text messages.  Every site with a Facebook login, "like" button, or comment interface also sends data back to Facebook which they use to build a "shadow profile".

[hbelkins]

Facebook is a free, reliable service for image hosting. I've been uploading my recent photos both to Flickr and Facebook.

But wouldn't people need a Facepoo account to see it?

Not for a Page. Facebook Pages are publicly visible to everyone and a FB account is not needed to view them. But I was thinking more in terms of image hosting for sharing images with places such as this forum.

To that end...

The only problem with Facebook is, IIRC, the image links tend to go dead after a while.

I haven't had that issue.

Let's test it.



This is linked from Facebook. Let's see how long the image stays up.

[J N Winkler]

Just reading this thread made me wonder.  Do people maintain local copies of their images even after uploading to flickr (or something else?)  I don't upload much of my image collection, but I maintain a local copy (and backup) of everything.  I'm curious what others do.

My strategy:

*  Nothing lives on the image acquisition device (phone or camera) permanently.  Photos are periodically emptied from both onto my main computer and are covered by nightly local backups (no cloud backup) until a convenient time arrives for archiving.  Transfer from the camera involves physically transferring a SDHC card between the camera and the reader (I bought it in 2007, when WLAN transfer capability would have entailed compromising on optical features).  Transfer from the phone is invariably by WLAN rather than USB cable, which I refuse to use (despite its being faster) because the helper application insists on loading at boot and is memory-hogging trash.

*  Photos are eventually archived to optical media (Blu-ray currently), external hard disk (current accumulating external HD has 8 TB and so should be good for another five years or so), and to a folder on the nightly backup disk that is separate from the nightly backup tarballs.

I have a Flickr account but do very little with it because Flickr's website is set up so that you have to spend your time on it, accepting exposure to their advertising, to generate metadata.  I just don't get enough of an emotional hit from having my photos seen by others to spend a large part of my days there.

I have experimented with having a world-visible Facebook album for image hotlinking, but have decided it is not a workable solution because each upload to it posts a "Jonathan added to this album" update to my feed, which is unacceptable to me because I am looking only for free hosting for forums, not attention from my Facebook friends.

[Eth]

Since all of my photography is done using an Android phone of some sort, all my photos automatically get backed up to Google Photos. My organization there leaves something to be desired, as I currently just have all my road photos in a single album (1,862 of them as of this writing). I don't link to those directly, though; when I actually want to post something, I download the photo from Google, do any necessary resizing or cropping on my end, and then upload them to my own webhost, which I'm basically just using as a glorified file server. As long as I continue to pay for the hosting, I feel pretty secure in the knowledge that the links won't break.

[Chris]

While those specific examples are more Google's forte, Facebook does engage in such tracking too.  Recently there was a scandal over their phone app downloading people's text messages.  Every site with a Facebook login, "like" button, or comment interface also sends data back to Facebook which they use to build a "shadow profile".

Facebook gathers much more data through tracking than through what you post on your Facebook profile. If you use a browser extension like Ghostery you can see how extensive this tracking of personal data is. If I open a random article on the Los Angeles Times website, there are 16 trackers, some of those are embedded in video players, so you basically need to block functionalities on the website to avoid tracking. It's not just about blocking ads.

Even closing your Facebook account does not stop Facebook from tracking you. Besides Facebook owning services like Instagram and WhatsApp, website tracking will just continue as well. The real power is the ability to combine all that data to get an accurate profile of the user.

Evidently Yahoo thought this was a viable business plan for Flickr, when they dropped the paid subcription plans.

[J N Winkler]

Google tracks you across the Web using UTM cookies.  There are also companies like NewRelic that specialize in software that enables a website owner to track users around the website, compiling statistical information for reporting through a dashboard.  I ran across NewRelic a few days ago when I was trying to figure out why a particular website was sending traffic to bam.nr.net and various subsites of newrelic.com, and also why some requests had "X-NewRelic-Id" headers as well as "X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest" headers.

The big players like Google and Facebook will assure you that they are moving to HTTPS Strict Transport Security (HSTS) because they are concerned about protecting you from man-in-the-middle attacks on your HTTPS traffic.  What they do not tell you is that HSTS also allows them to track you through supercookies.

[Big John]

Even Facebook tracks your political affiliation using algorithms. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/facebook-categorize-users-political-preferences/

I looked up what they had on me and they sure got it wrong.

[US71]

Even Facebook tracks your political affiliation using algorithms. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/facebook-categorize-users-political-preferences/

I looked up what they had on me and they sure got it wrong.

They didn't have mine at all.

[formulanone]

I had never thought of using the Commons as a hosting service before. That's kind of brilliant, in its own way, but at the same time, it almost feels like abuse of the system.

As long as you're fine with freely licensing it, Commons is fine with you using their hosting. You get a reliable host, they get a free image to add to their collection (and maybe use to illustrate a Minnesota road article). It's a win-win.

I've marked about 99% of my photos on Flickr with a Creative Commons license, so there's bots that migrate some of the images to Wikimedia Commons. I upload a few here and there directly, but I rarely find enough time to directly send them to Commons. In some cases, it's neat to see how far and wide your photos wind up on the web.

(Sadly, my most "famous" photo is not related to roads.)

[Scott5114]

I had never thought of using the Commons as a hosting service before. That's kind of brilliant, in its own way, but at the same time, it almost feels like abuse of the system.

As long as you're fine with freely licensing it, Commons is fine with you using their hosting. You get a reliable host, they get a free image to add to their collection (and maybe use to illustrate a Minnesota road article). It's a win-win.

To be honest, I'm kind of honored when someone uses one of my road pictures for something (has happened once!). All I care about is being credited–I take these pictures as a hobby, not as a way to try and make money.

Maybe I'll look into making an account and uploading some stuff...

That's perfect for Commons, then. You'll probably want to use the CC-BY-SA license, which requires attribution to you, and that any edited versions of the photo will also require attribution.

I should note that my above endorsement of Commons as a host specifically applies to road photos. Those have a pretty clear case for being kept. For general-use hosting, of things like photos of your mom, or your cat, or screenshots of TV shows, or things of that nature, using Commons is questionable to outright prohibited.