Why use Photo hosting services?

[justwordme]

I'm new to this BB stuff why do some websites use a webhosting service instead of the way I currently upload a pic to my XenForo site? Is XenForo designed differently or? (I can see movies taking up lots of space but not images)

 

[Kevin]

On a small site, no, images won't have much of an impact but for larger sites image storage could quickly eat up their available server space.

To look at it another way, if you have 1,000 users who all upload a one megabyte image, there is a gigabyte of drive space there alone taken up. Multiply that several fold, taking into account needing to back up those images, and the problem becomes apparent.

 

[justwordme]

ok cool thanks for response.........How do you enforce or offload image hosting??? So that users are using other services? Can I create my own hosting service or white label one?

 

[Crazyfruitbat]

On a small site, no, images won't have much of an impact but for larger sites image storage could quickly eat up their available server space.

To look at it another way, if you have 1,000 users who all upload a one megabyte image, there is a gigabyte of drive space there alone taken up. Multiply that several fold, taking into account needing to back up those images, and the problem becomes apparent.

Agreed, on my site I ask people to link to images via flickr or something else and it's become a lot easier to manage.

ok cool thanks for response.........How do you enforce or offload image hosting??? So that users are using other services? Can I create my own hosting service or white label one?

You can take off jpg, gif etc off the upload system if you feel that you dont want anyone to upload in those formats. What I tend to do is keep a low filesize if people do use it. I think the max filesize is about 100kb as most images on the net can be displayed quite large at that filesize at an optimised rate, though I encourage flickr to avoid not only backup issues but also it decreases the monthly bandwidth if they use external sources.

 

[Digital Doctor]

YET, the last thing you want to do is to make barriers for people to contribute to your site.
Aren't good images contributors to Search Engine Traffic ?

Is one option ... running a cron job and uploading all the forum images to the forum's flickr account ? and use the flickr URL ?

 

[Anthony Parsons]

I enforce the other way, being that they upload to the site, not link to images. This ensures the integrity of the images for years to come, so when people close flickr accounts, etc, it doesn't affect my sites pages.

I guess it depends on your monthly budget to run your site...

 

[Digital Doctor]

I enforce the other way, being that they upload to the site, not link to images.

This ensures the integrity of the images for years to come, so when people close flickr accounts, etc, it doesn't affect my sites pages.

great point.

I wonder if a best of both worlds thing could be setup:
(1) Images are hosted remotely.
(2) Xenforo fetches remote images and saves them locally.
(3) Broken images auto heal if the remote URL goes down.

 

[iTuN3r]

great point.

I wonder if a best of both worlds thing could be setup:
(1) Images are hosted remotely.
(2) Xenforo fetches remote images and saves them locally.
(3) Broken images auto heal if the remote URL goes down.

You think too much go and sleep already !

 

[Walter]

Another disadvantage of letting the users use other services is that sometimes threads take very long to load when that other service is slow as hell.

 

[Anthony Parsons]

Another disadvantage of letting the users use other services that sometimes threads take very long to load when that other service is slow as hell.

That's another reason I force upload and not remote linking... it screws users around more than just having a good host and server to host them yourself.

 

[mrGTB]

Why not do what I did with an image recently, I uploaded it to my Twitter account (they allow image uploading now with tweets made). Then linked to it on my forum to show it. Works great and you have control of images stored and uploaded on your forums twitter account, it's free also.

 

[Adimaryanto]

Why not do what I did with an image recently, I uploaded it to my Twitter account (they allow image uploading now with tweets made). Then linked to it on my forum to show it. Works great and you have control of images stored and uploaded on your forums twitter account, it's free also.

how to ... Your explanation is less clear

 

[Adimaryanto]

You think too much go and sleep already !

yes it is .... that's what I was looking for

 

[agison]

I installed Gallery3 on a separate server then use it for upload images.
It's not easy to get BBCode from Photo hosting services and paste them to forum posts.

 

[Adimaryanto]

I installed Gallery3 on a separate server then use it for upload images.
It's not easy to get BBCode from Photo hosting services and paste them to forum posts.

i try this code (tiny pic.com) :

<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<center>
<script type="text/javascript">
tinypic_layout = 'narrow';
tinypic_type = 'images';
tinypic_links = 'forum';
tinypic_language = 'en';
tinypic_search = 'false';
tinypic_autoload = true;
</script>
<script src="http://plugin.tinypic.com/j/plugin.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<div><p>Copy code and paste to your thread<p>
</div>
</body>
</html>

The question is : how to insert / replace the "upload a file" button ?

 

[DroidHost]

xenFlickr is not a dream ! it is a reality