Dollieh Sanctuary

Why cant we post photos directly from our computer to forum?

If we did, it would use up too much space, and open up the forum to major issues with viruses. Junkspot used to do their forum that way and it crashed several times due to it. I like to use Flickr for my photo's and also Photobucket is popular.

Our more techy members can correct or expand on my answer, but as I understand it, there has to be a "home" for the photos on the net, either a personal website or from a site like Flickr. Forums and pages that we don't personally have administrative control over cannot (or should not) be used.

It's considered very bad internet form to "steal bandwidth" from another page by linking directly to photos, also.

As Zircon says, if Greyhaunt allowed attaching pics to threads, her host would get completely cluttered with pics. And if you mean linking to your computer from a forum... well... you don't even want that to be possible. Imagine how easy it would be to connect to your computer and hack your files.

I have allowed attaching pics to threads on my Pamela Love forum but we have like 3 regular members

I have used Fotki for a while. The free membership does not allow very large photos, but they are certainly large enough for looking at on the web.

I see, ok!
was looking for easy, like on face book you just choose and post.
but I can see how it would clog a forum.

I always use http://imgur.com for pics I don't want on my Flickr stream. Posting images from imgur is easy

Well, Facebook actually houses the photos on their site so you are uploading, not linking directly from you pc.

Unlike big sites that have banks of dedicated servers with tons of storage, DS probably shares a small server with a few other web sites. So even though the DS account has "unlimited storage" and "unlimited bandwidth" it just means we aren't charged for how much we use. However, the more resources we use the slower things can get. If we had to host all the images from the site things would get bogged down a lot more. I'm sure some of you that have been here for a while have seen some of our "slow days".

There are a lot of storage sites out there that have modest or no cost at all. Some ISPs provide their users with a small amount of online storage space. For example, Comcast provides it's account holders with 1GB of storage for "personal web pages". This can be used for image storage.

I use tinypic because it's easy and actually works on my phone.