I have my own website, so it's no brainer to put photos in there.
It's not the most economical or easy to use solution, but it's a lot cheaper than $400/year!
I pay $9.95/month at
www.hostmonster.com
I had a bit of luck testing out the process outlined below for Andy (oldironfarmer), and it seems to have worked out OK.
PhotoBucket allows an album download, although large albums failed to download for me (always failing at about 50%, give or take 20%).
But that's probably because I'm in Australia...
So in order to download large albums, I've had success running up an EC2 instance in AWS (Amazon Web Services) and downloading from there.
For example, an 800MB album was taking 20-30 minutes to get to 50% on my home internet connection before failing (and it's a relatively fast connection, 60mbps down, 30 up, so I don't know where the bottleneck is). Downloading to an AWS EC2 instance only took a few minutes.
It downloads as one big zip file, so once I had that on the EC2 machine, I just had to login to the cPanel interface for my website and use file manager to upload it to a folder that had the same name as the PhotoBucket album. I could have used FTP, but using the web based file manager allowed me to upload the zip, instead of 2,000 individual files, and the just select it and hit "extract".
Once they were in there, I just set the folder to have public read permissions.
Then for each post that had the nasty PB ransom pic, just edit the post and replace the prefix...
http://s32.photobucket.com/albumname/
with
http://www.mywebsite.com/albumname/
PB adds a random string to the end of the photos, but if you download the album from PB, it keeps the filename. If you upload the originals from your PC, you would also need to remove the appended randomness.
For anybody who doesn't have, or want, their own website, but is willing to go through a slight learning curve, I think a better option might be to put your image files in Amazon's AWS S3 service...
https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
It's ridiculously cheap, at $0.023/GB/Month
So
Drives' 1.38GB mentioned above would cost about 38 cents/year.
There's additional costs for data transfer, but that's likely to be pretty minimal too. The first GB of transfer out to the internet is free, and 9c/GB after that.
Even if every photo was read hundreds of times each month, it's still down in the low dollars/month, and I think the nature of forum posts would be that new posts get looked at lots, and old photos get viewed very rarely.
Here's what I just did as a test...
Opened the AWS management console here...
https://www.amazon.com/?tag=atomicindus08-20
Clicked on the S3 service under "Storage", which took me to here...
https://console.aws.amazon.com/s3/
- Click "Create bucket"
- Gave it a name - "twobytes-garagejournal-images"
- Click "Next", leave properties as default
- Click "Next"
- Under "Manage Permissions", change to "Grant Public Read Access"
- Click "Next"
- Click "Create Bucket"
Then click on your new bucket and click "upload" and follow the bouncing ball to get your photos in there. Just remember to grant public read permissions to each file.
Once they're in there, click on the file name to get the public web address, like this...
https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/twobytes-garagejournal-images/suba0371.jpg
Then wrap IMG tags around it, and wah-lah! Bob's your ex-Prime Minister...
Once you've done a few, you won't need to fetch the full address for each one, just copy the prefix over and add your file name manually.
I hope that rambling late night post made some sense to somebody somewhere! Happy to answer questions if anybody wants to ask any.
