Quitting Flickr Soon for imgbb

[r.e.]

If you look up imgbb.com using a "whois" service, you get this. They really, really don't want anyone to know who they are.
______________________________________________________________________________

Registrant Withheld for Privacy Purposes
Registrant Org Privacy service provided by Withheld for Privacy ehf
Registrant Country is
Registrar NAMECHEAP INC NameCheap, Inc.
IANA ID: 1068
URL: http://www.namecheap.com
Whois Server: whois.namecheap.com

Registrar Status clientTransferProhibited
Dates 2,497 days old
Created on 2014-12-05
Expires on 2025-12-05
Updated on 2020-04-12 Whois History
Name Servers PDNS1.REGISTRAR-SERVERS.COM (has 7,675,872 domains)
PDNS2.REGISTRAR-SERVERS.COM (has 7,675,872 domains)

Tech Contact Withheld for Privacy Purposes
Privacy service provided by Withheld for Privacy ehf
Kalkofnsvegur 2,
Reykjavik, Capital Region, 101, is

Withholding that information is common. I do it myself with the domains that I own. I haven't used imgbb, but it appears to be quite popular. There doesn't appear to be any reliable information on who owns the site or where the business is located. It isn't necessarily Iceland. Its Facebook and Twitter accounts are dormant placeholders and contain no useful "About" information. Doesn't appear to be on Instagram or YouTube. The company has no forum of its own and does not appear to be active on others.

Imgbb is said to generate revenue via advertising. A number of "reviews" of the site say that every photograph is checked and approved by a person. Trustpilot has a few reviews from people who say that they lost all their images on imgbb and that communication is extremely poor, but most sites have at least some negative reviews.

With so little info to go on, I personally wouldn't use imgbb for long-term storage.

[_tf_]

I used to use Smugmug. It became too expensive for me, and too cumbersome to use. So, I started my own web site through bluehost.com. It does cost me about $200.00 per year. But, I have unlimited storage. I can also set up my site any way that I want. All of the images I post here are hosted at my web site. I never have to worry about any changes that are outside of my control. The costs for the hosting at bluehost have been more stable than Smugmug ever was.

You can see one of many galleries I maintain in my signature below. Adding images is automated with some java programs I wrote, and the use of Linux rsync.

Similar experience here, I signed up for Smugmug because the printing integration was appealing, but I got caught out by the crippleware licensing, turns out only the top level subscription provides adequate control over how images are printed, even the second tier portfolio is too crippled to be usable for anything other than selling mugs and coasters. Worst of all, SM roll out backwards incompatible updates to the software, so if you have a customized site it will break regularly without your knowledge, and unless one is enough of a narcissist to regularly browse their own photo galleries, it can take weeks to discover. Also they pay zero attention to user feature requests. (The lesson I learnt from that is before signing up for a service, take time to browse the support forums to get a feel for the level of frustration the service causes to its users).

I ended up self-hosting Ghost with a custom theme, this is what it looks like. I don't have it automated in any way, each image is nominally the cover for a blog post, but it works well enough for me, and will run happily on a cheap host.

[Tin Can]

I have websites since 2001

What a PITA

Most of what I post here is educational or example

I have prints nobody sees, just as I want

Some post such low rez we cannot see the image, just chalk

Mostly I piss off some as I become court jester, a role I know well

Make the King laugh or lose you head

[Gabe]

The free account means you have to put up with advertising when viewing images, and, perhaps more importantly, your images are shown with advertising to people without an account, I pretty much pay because of the latter. I don't mind paying for services like Flickr, but I have not been impressed with Smugmug's handling of it, they haven't done anything to make it better than Yahoo left it, just ramped up the fees. I am very close to just leaving it myself.

Just use an adblocking browser extension and you will never have to look at ads on Flickr. I use uBlock Origin.

I'm still holding out on Flickr, but I agree it has been increasingly swirling down the drain since Smugmug bought it out, despite their promises that "nothing would change". One of the biggest issues is the exodus of so many talented photographers from the platform; presumably because there is almost no exposure to be had there now with all the kiddies using Instagram. One of the oldest and biggest large format groups on there is now moribund, with no new additions for almost a year now because the admin is AWOL.