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Image Hosting for Forum Games
MrBlarney
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Howdy, folks. I'm mostly a lurker these days, but I still have a minor presence in Critical Failures, mostly in the hosting of various forum implementations of board games. Recently, I've only been hosting Twilight Imperium games, and to that end, I've been using my free Dropbox account to host my game images via links (Example) rather than directly embedding the images. This is because the images are fairly large (1401 x 1401) and I don't really want to break tables or require an excessive amount of scrolling.
However, I've been thinking about hosting other games lately, images with a smaller screen real estate. For these games, it makes sense to be able to just embed images into posts using IMG tags. In the past, I've used Photobucket for image hosting (e.g. Battlestar Galactica, Codenames). However, in the years since those games, there have been major limitations added to free accounts in the number of images that can be hosted (250) and (coming soon, in June) the total monthly bandwidth for hosted images (25 MB/mo). It doesn't feel like it makes sense for me to move to a paid account considering how little I use the service, so I've been looking into moving to a different image host.
There are a couple major considerations that I've got in mind for an image host. First of all, I tend to upload lots of images that have small disk size. So I'm unlikely to bump up against any storage limits in terms of memory or bandwidth (unless they're truly oppressive like Photobucket), but more likely to hit limits on count if there are any. Second, I want to be able to revise and edit images in case I need to correct errors. Dropbox is nice since even if I update an image, the URL stays the same. However, I can't directly host it so it shows up as an embedded IMG in the forum. I'd rather not use the forum's image upload feature for hosting images if I can help it, since it does require a new upload for image fixes and it's harder to keep everything organized.
So, if anyone has any suggestions for free or cheap image hosts for embedding images for forum games, I'd like to hear 'em. Heck, it might end up being the case that subscribing to a web host is my best solution, so if there's any opinions on particular providers, I'd love to hear those too as a potential option.
However, I've been thinking about hosting other games lately, images with a smaller screen real estate. For these games, it makes sense to be able to just embed images into posts using IMG tags. In the past, I've used Photobucket for image hosting (e.g. Battlestar Galactica, Codenames). However, in the years since those games, there have been major limitations added to free accounts in the number of images that can be hosted (250) and (coming soon, in June) the total monthly bandwidth for hosted images (25 MB/mo). It doesn't feel like it makes sense for me to move to a paid account considering how little I use the service, so I've been looking into moving to a different image host.
There are a couple major considerations that I've got in mind for an image host. First of all, I tend to upload lots of images that have small disk size. So I'm unlikely to bump up against any storage limits in terms of memory or bandwidth (unless they're truly oppressive like Photobucket), but more likely to hit limits on count if there are any. Second, I want to be able to revise and edit images in case I need to correct errors. Dropbox is nice since even if I update an image, the URL stays the same. However, I can't directly host it so it shows up as an embedded IMG in the forum. I'd rather not use the forum's image upload feature for hosting images if I can help it, since it does require a new upload for image fixes and it's harder to keep everything organized.
So, if anyone has any suggestions for free or cheap image hosts for embedding images for forum games, I'd like to hear 'em. Heck, it might end up being the case that subscribing to a web host is my best solution, so if there's any opinions on particular providers, I'd love to hear those too as a potential option.
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But they generate a new URL for reuploads so you can't change the image behind a specific link. This is probably by design (switching out the images behind public shared links and embeds can be used in a goosy way.) so I think you'd need a personal web host for that.
But the best bet (or so it would appear based on the information uncovered in this comprehensive list) might be Google Photos. Which apparently can be found at photos.google.com. According to this search they offer ridiculous amounts of upload space and are great for making edits to images post-upload. Give them a look?
Imageshack appears to only have a 30-day trial before moving to a paid plan, so that's probably out as a solution.
I did consider Imgur as an option before making my post, though the random URLs were a sticking point for me. I'm also still not quite sure about how easy it would be to manage and add to albums (i.e. have folders/albums for each game (e.g. "Twilight Imperium", "Battlestar Galactica"), and an subfolder/album for each instance of that game (e.g. "Game 01", "Game 02"). Perhaps I really should just be looking to some cheap web hosting...