BobMcBob wrote:I know WH recommends linking to external sites for images but I've always though it more sensible from a technical point of view to host the images on the same site as the text. That way you know the images will always be available for the site to use. I suppose it's a pain uploading everything twice but it's probably what I'll be doing from now on.
Just spotted this - and we need to update so thanks! The original reason that we recommended this was because having all the photos on a single private server means it tends to grind to a halt if lots of photos are being requested from the same server at once.
Since that was written we have actually have changed the way that Walkhighlands serves photos to improve this - the photos uploaded to our forum (and elsewhere on Walkhighlands) are now served by Amazon's Cloudfront content distribution network, which means they should always work well regardless of volume traffic (though it's more expensive!) So the text was out of date.
In view of this - and following what has happened to Photobucket (and the potential for it to happen to more photo sites) I've changed the photo upload text to go back to having uploading direct to Walkhighlands as being the first option. This way your report will be safe from any future photo hosting site changes.
I'm unsure if we should do anything about all the photobucket reports (and private sites) with broken link photos - we could mark them all with the private blog post box so they don't appear on the hill or walk pages (report owners would be able to change them back again or edit and fix them), but then some of them might have text that those looking for specific hills might be interested in. Maybe we could remove the 'likes' on reports with photobucket photos so they go to the bottom of the lists?
