Quote:
Originally Posted by tovangar2
Re "unavailable" or even "forbidden" images on previous pages. There seems to be a great many more now. This distresses me greatly as so much valuable work has gone into this thread over the years. Is there any way to correct it? I try to remember to run everything through Picassa, rather than linking directly, but sometimes forget (not that my posts ever reach the pinnacles achieved here).
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Los Angeles Past
Keeping every image you post on your own hosting is the only way to avoid this. Never, ever hotlink images, folks. Just don't do it. With Photobucket and Imageshack accounts freely available, there's no excuse for images disappearing because the original host changes its URLs.
It's also a big discouragement to new readers to find so many images gone. It becomes more frustration than it's worth, particularly when they see there are still 500+ pages yet to view, most if not all with useless posts now because the images are no more. They see it's a waste of time slogging through hundreds of posts that have lost their graphics, and just give up.
It's really too late for most of us to go back and fix these gaps, too. Some of our most important contributors have hundreds, even thousands of posts on this thread. It's a shame to have put so much time and energy into writing, only for their posts to lose their informational value because the hosts they linked to changed their image URLs. It didn't have to happen, but to go back and correct everything now would be too monumental a task. A little forethought, and this all could have been avoided.-Scott
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Running pics through Imageshack is not necessarily a sure thing. If the account is deleted, or for some reason pics are deleted to make space, the images here will also vanish. This does not seem to be the case with Picasa. Unfortunately, this kind of thread is ephemeral, and as such is vulnerable to deterioration if not complete removal. Blogs are more secure, but, even though I have a few, I'm not sure how one could be set up to have posts by multiple contributors without a single overseer with the time and interest to make it more secure and official. Oddly, I've found pics missing on old posts here, only to find that some of the pages that have been archived, somehow by whomever, retain the images.