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Imgur continues its downward spiral. It's turned from a lightweight image host, with a few nice extra features, into an incompatible-with-older-browsers JS-ridden half-gimped image-oriented-social-slanted thing. Maybe the worsening started after its 2014's multi-million external investment?

So, any recommended alternatives similar to what Imgur used to be?

Free OneDrive/Google Drive works for me when I just need to upload some images and link them somewhere.

Rent a cheap VPS and host your own photo upload site? Bottom tier Linode instance is $5/month for 25GB of storage and 1TB of data transfer. If $5/month is too much, split it with a couple of friends.

I use Flickr for all my junk. Easy upload using the app on my phone since all my pictures are taken on it these days.

Imgur still works, what you have to do to bypass the social/JS frontend is upload your image, wait a second for it to process, then right-click the image and select "open in a new tab/window." The new tab or window has the direct image URL.

The social/JS/etc. frontend attracts the advertisers which pay for the hosting bandwidth...so, whatever. As long as I can bypass that and host a few random images, I'm good.

Yeah, Imgur still lets you direct-link, they just hide the links under menu options (or I suppose you can use the trick above, haven't tried that one).

Yeah i'm not sure what you're talking about. I still use Imgur to post images here with direct links. like so

https://i.imgur.com/u5QEx0F.jpg?1

obv it needs img tags to embed but imgur still works fine for me. I just upload my image, click on the thumbnail, and all the links are right there on the right side of the image staring me in the face.

Yeah, I'm still using Imgur. It really doesn't seem that bad.

Heiwashin wrote:

I use Flickr for all my junk. Easy upload using the app on my phone since all my pictures are taken on it these days.

The trouble with Flickr is that they don't want you to direct-link to your images, and in fact have gone out of their way to make it difficult (you can still do it if you look at the page source, of course). In fact I believe their ToS specifically prohibits it; I don't know, while I have an account there I haven't used it much and the last time I looked it was pretty much impossible to figure out what their ToS are, at least for the free accounts. Plus it's owned by Yahoo, which always feels like it is circling the drain.

It's all really easy with Dropbox.

UberGerbil wrote:

Yeah, I'm still using Imgur. It really doesn't seem that bad.

Heiwashin wrote:

I use Flickr for all my junk. Easy upload using the app on my phone since all my pictures are taken on it these days.

The trouble with Flickr is that they don't want you to direct-link to your images, and in fact have gone out of their way to make it difficult (you can still do it if you look at the page source, of course). In fact I believe their ToS specifically prohibits it; I don't know, while I have an account there I haven't used it much and the last time I looked it was pretty much impossible to figure out what their ToS are, at least for the free accounts. Plus it's owned by Yahoo, which always feels like it is circling the drain.

To be fair, SmugMug has acquired Flickr, which will at least keep it from whatever death-by-neglect Oath would have inflicted upon it. I never understood how two self-consciously "fun" 90s brands like AOL and Yahoo could be shoveled into a new entity called Oath, but it's not my job to comprehend corporate logic.

UberGerbil wrote:

Plus it's owned by Yahoo, which always feels like it is circling the drain.

Well, they're part of Verizon now; so when they do eventually go, it'll probably be from a bullet to the head rather than going down the drain. Eventually Verizon will get tired of feeding the massive money pit.

just brew it! wrote:

UberGerbil wrote:

Plus it's owned by Yahoo, which always feels like it is circling the drain.

Well, they're part of Verizon now; so when they do eventually go, it'll probably be from a bullet to the head rather than going down the drain. Eventually Verizon will get tired of feeding the massive money pit.

Not any more, SmugMug has 'em.

Concupiscence wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

UberGerbil wrote:

Plus it's owned by Yahoo, which always feels like it is circling the drain.

Well, they're part of Verizon now; so when they do eventually go, it'll probably be from a bullet to the head rather than going down the drain. Eventually Verizon will get tired of feeding the massive money pit.

Not any more, SmugMug has 'em.

Ahh, I guess I haven't been following the latest developments. So which parts of Yahoo does Verizon still own? Everything else?

just brew it! wrote:

Concupiscence wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

Well, they're part of Verizon now; so when they do eventually go, it'll probably be from a bullet to the head rather than going down the drain. Eventually Verizon will get tired of feeding the massive money pit.

Not any more, SmugMug has 'em.

Ahh, I guess I haven't been following the latest developments. So which parts of Yahoo does Verizon still own? Everything else?

As far as I know Verizon devoured the rest. Whatever plans Oath has for the stalwarts of early interweb access, I don't want anything to do with them.

And yes, Imgur's turned into a Javascript-ruined hellhole. The loops I have to jump through on my iPhone to get at a source image that hasn't been recompressed to hell are embarrassing.

Well I'm pretty sure they spun off the Alibaba stake as part of that whole thing, so honestly I have no idea what on earth Yahoo really has that is worth much of anything.

Captain Ned wrote:

It's all really easy with Dropbox.

It certainly was, before they ditched the Public folder. I haven't had time to figure out what to do next.

Thanks. Just looking for a quick way to host images for forum posts and other random uses, not self-hosting or something with accounts.

I know it works, or can be made to work, for now. It's just been getting increasingly annoying to use. Ignoring browser compatibility issues and heavyish pages, I haven't found a way to get image delete links since a few years ago (other than their ephemeral AJAX based option). It also reencodes JPEGs. The way it's going, soon enough it will be the another ImageShack or PhotoBucket. Best put images someplace they might stay accessible.

BTW, are the thumbnail links exposed anywhere in the GUI? I just happen to remember some old URL formats for thumbnails, which still work.

BTW2, sad to see http://vid.me gone. It was like Imgur (the old one) but for video.

Glorious wrote:

Well I'm pretty sure they spun off the Alibaba stake as part of that whole thing, so honestly I have no idea what on earth Yahoo really has that is worth much of anything.

Tons of people still use Yahoo mail.


For some reason.

Glorious wrote:

no idea what on earth Yahoo really has that is worth much of anything.

For what it's worth, the main domain is ranked 7th on Alexa.

SuperSpy wrote:

Tons of people still use Yahoo mail.
For some reason.

Why not? I still use it, among other accounts.

MOSFET wrote:

Captain Ned wrote:

It's all really easy with Dropbox.

It certainly was, before they ditched the Public folder. I haven't had time to figure out what to do next.

At the end of the link, change "dl=0" to "raw=1".

meerkt wrote:

BTW, are the thumbnail links exposed anywhere in the GUI? I just happen to remember some old URL formats for thumbnails, which still work.

You change the size at the bottom on the right, then select which format you want from the links listed above. Not ideal, but it's not THAT bad.

I don't see that interface. Does it come up without being logged in? (I can't test with an account because registration fails.)

just brew it! wrote:

Rent a cheap VPS and host your own photo upload site? Bottom tier Linode instance is $5/month for 25GB of storage and 1TB of data transfer. If $5/month is too much, split it with a couple of friends.

Along the same line, just put files on S3. No host even needed. Turn on static file hosting, and you can host files off it will full HTTPs and everything too. Images can be direct linked. Storage costs literally cents per month.

I have a script that uploads to my misc buckets, and I just share links out to those. Or just use the S3 uploader on the AWS console.

Google drive works as well, but not so well if you want the raw image link direct to your jpeg.

S3 is what I've been using also. I have other uses for an AWS account in addition to image hosting, so it's convenient for me.

meerkt wrote:

I don't see that interface. Does it come up without being logged in? (I can't test with an account because registration fails.)

I'm logged in there. Why does the registration fail for you? Maybe that's the first step to working toward solving your issues.

The image i upload without being logged in still gives me an imgur.com/blahblahblah link but it's not the .img.

meerkt wrote:

into an incompatible-with-older-browsers

meerkt wrote:

into an incompatible-with-older-browsers

meerkt wrote:

into an incompatible-with-older-browsers

Uh-huh.

At least he's not complaining that it doesn't work in Lynx.

meerkt wrote:

For what it's worth, the main domain is ranked 7th on Alexa.

But that's precisely the question: just what *IS* that worth?

I'm not sure, but 4 billion seems really high.

DancinJack wrote:

Why does the registration fail for you? Maybe that's the first step to working toward solving your issues.

I thought a bug related to the site redesign but it still fails today (and they've reverted to the previous design). Maybe they dislike Mailinator but instead of saying so explicitly they call it "403". Anyway it was just to check if there's a difference while logged in. I don't plan on publicly uploading with an account.

just brew it! wrote:

At least he's not complaining that it doesn't work in Lynx.

Graceful degradation used to be considered cool but it seems to have become old fashioned. I'm very much not a fan of this sorta-SaaS mindset that's trendy now, where browsers (and OSes) are in constant flux and users are expected be passively auto-updated without a say. It might not be so bad if it didn't include major changes like breaking plugin compatibility or ever-changing GUIs, and usually to the worse. Add to that the removal of useful features (and general touchification/dumbification), and the introduction of anti-useful ones (Twitter/WhatsApp/Snapchat/Tinder integration + make VoIP voice calls! + U+1F4A9 + Unicode 11.0 animated emojis!!!), and yeah, I'm not as eager to update as I used to be.

Glorious wrote:

But that's precisely the question: just what *IS* that worth?

Don't know where Alexa's data comes from (Amazon browser extensions?), but I think somehow it's still a good proxy for traffic/users, and that's what everyone are after?

meerkt wrote:

Don't know where Alexa's data comes from (Amazon browser extensions?), but I think somehow it's still a good proxy for traffic/users, and that's what everyone are after?

I don't mean the quality of the data, I mean, what is the value of having the 7th most traveled website or whatever? Like, I'm stipulating that yes, that is exactly what it is, Alexa is perfectly representative, entirely accurate, etc...

I doubt it's actually 4 billion dollars, particularly not if the demographics of those users are what I would expect....

I mean, that's me personally, sure, but I'd like to see the revenue models by which they justify what *they* think. (yes, I know they'd never show them to me)