toffee_pie said:
I have 17GB on my google drive, 105GB on MS One Drive, people can get these, and also the usual drop box etc to upload pics to forums - I am not counting my Synology storage which probably is ample to host some entire web forums itself.
Dont see how you can ever get charged for this, unless the fee is upgrading storage space which is a seperate thing.
Let's not get storage confused with image hosting
Image hosting allows an image to be embedded elsewhere.
Embedding an image can be done either using html, or by use of BB code. For obvious reasons, forums use BB code in their posts.
The BB code for embedding an image is (without spaces)
[ img ] url-of-an-image-the url-ending-in-jpg-or-png [ /img ]
For example, in BBC sport pages -->
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/40488056 there is an image.
If you right-click on the image and "open image in new tab" you get the image in a new tab, and then you can copy the url
Here is the url of the image -->
http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/onesport/cps/624/cpsprodpb/126DF/production/_96678457_ham_vet_rage.png
If I want to embed the image I place IMG BB code round the url
[ img ]
http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/onesport/cps/624/cpsprodpb/126DF/production/_96678457_ham_vet_rage.png [ /img ]
If I write that without spaces the image is now embedded
Note that IMG BB code will
only work with urls ending in .jpg or .png , so if you have a url for an image that does not end in .jpg or .png it cannot be
embedded in a post in a forum.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but google drive and onedrive do not facilitate url's ending in .jpg or .png
The issue with photobucket is that they now host over 10 billion images from between 50 to 100 million users.
I would suggest that a very high percentage of those users only use photobucket for image hosting on forums, thus photobucket are probably experiencing huge amounts of traffic from their servers, most of which results in zero advertising revenue.
Wikipedia has a good list of image hosting sites -->
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_image-sharing_websites
If you look at the list, you will see that Imgur has an unknown number of users, and if you go to the wiki page on Imgur you'll see that it has overtaken Photobucket in popularity and is mainly funded by donations. But IMO as users switch from Photobucket to Imgur to host pictures on forums, Imgur will eventually face the same problem of huge volumes of traffic from embedded images, and so they may well end up either banning users who only use Imgur for image hosting, or introduce a fee.
Finally, as I've already pointed out, photbucket can still be used by placing the image url in a post without surrounding it with the BB code, but that will not embed the image.