For years I used Photobucket for things like inserting images in forum posts. I can't do that anymore unless I pay them $40 a month. Asking customers to pay for a service is reasonable; the price they're asking is not.

Can anyone recommend an image hosting service that allows third-party hosting for a reasonable price like $5 a month?

Jeanette Isabelle

Many internet service providers offer (or USED to) a free personal website for each account. They don't give you a ton of disk space, but if you trim your photos down to a reasonable size for internet posts (not full size as they come out of your camera) then you can put a lot of them up on your personal website. I never used the personal websites that my ISP's have provided, so I don't know how easy they are to use. But if your ISP provides that, and you can figure out how to work it, that would be a free way of hosting your pictures.

These free ISP-hosted websites are not meant for heavy-duty hosting. I think your ISP would get mad if you posted pictures that were getting ten's of thousands of hits per hour. But that shouldn't be the case for pictures on a forum like ETS.

Another alternative might be the third party hosting site postimg.org. I have never used that site, but in a different forum that I frequent someone asked a question just like yours in this post we're reading now, and that website was suggested.

Also, note that maybe forum websites (but not ETS unfortunately) provide a way for you to upload your pictures directly to the forum website in your post, negating the need for a third party hosting service. Look for something in the thread creation dialog box about "uploading" something, rather than "linking" something.

I'm testing an image hosting service. Let me know if the picture is visible.



Jeanette Isabelle

Looks good.

Dropbox.com is free.

First the disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Photobucket. I'm receiving no benefit from posting this. This is for those who have used Photobucket in the past and have stopped using it due to unreasonably expensive plans.

After a year of unreasonable prices, Photobucket finally has plans that the rest of us can afford. If you had a Photobucket account and no longer use it due to its high cost, look at the new plans they unveiled today.

Jeanette Isabelle

Doesn´t matter what they want,I´m not going to pay one cent. I have moved to using Postimage hosting.

On forums that don't self-host uploaded images, I just usually don't post images any more. Most of the forums I visit self-host, except ETS doesn't.

If I need to get an image or some other files to/from a fellow forum member, I coordinate with them via PM, and then give them an (expiring) link to my personal cloud service for upload/download. I host this cloud service myself on my own servers (using NextCloud and Docker container software). I don't use commercial services like Dropbox due to security/privacy concerns.

I've used Photobucket for years. Moving the photos from Photobucket to a free service is not the problem. Editing every forum post containing a Photobucket link would be a nightmare.

Jeanette Isabelle

No need to do that. Every member of any forum on the net knows about the Photobucket money grab, and what those dead links seen in posts mean. It's a constant reminder to folks, "Don't ever use Photobucket" because this is what you'll get when they grab for your wallet (and they most likely will, again).