Due to the recent Photobucket debacle, we are doing a bit of research into options for our members. The idea of a free service for hosting large amounts of photos is interesting, and it always amazed me that PB was free for what it did. It had some annoying bits and pieces, but the price was good. Obviously their approach of breaking a lot of folks' websites after enticing them in with "free" was unconscionable, and we can't recommend them after that move.

Some of the free sites we know of are photos.google.com/Google Photos . Great if you already have a gmail address as it is free and likely to stay free given Googles successful business model.

Others we know of without any endorsement are listed below. Please do your research and choose after some good intel. Please report back in this thread if you find a good - OR BAD - photo host!

photos.google.com/

imgur.com/

www.flickr.com/

500px.com/home

www.dropbox.com/home

A very interesting one is postimages.org/ which has plugins for certain forum software (unfortunately not us). I have inquired, but a cursory examination of the site seems to be a pretty usable interface.

If you are willing to pay a fee, currently $36 a year or $6 a month, www.smugmug.com/plans/basicSmugmug has been around a very long time with an excellent reputation for service. We are not affiliated with them. If you end up seeing a banner ad for them, we may have worked out such a deal, so we want to be painfully transparent! They have been associated with ADVRIDER.com. Apparently the founder's kids are now operating the site. It is a premium photographer website which for higher charges allows even opening your own photo store!

Again, if you come up with a really good solution you can recommend for our users, please post in this thread!

If you have a whole bunch of photos stored on Photobucket, you will find they have removed the album download link! Jeez.

Well, a quick search for Chrome Extensions found a neat one here: sharecoding.wordpress.com/photobucket-downloader/

You can also go to the Chrome store and search for photobucket and get it that way. chrome.google.com/webstore/search/photobucket?hl=en-US

This adds a neat download link on the album page, which you click, and it downloads all of the photos in the album in 100 photo zip files! Automatically! It does cost $1.99, but in my book it is way worth it!

One note, if you have more than 100 photos in an album, it will pop up a download window each time it has one ready to go.

hey Mako. when I clicked on the Chrome link there was also a new add-on called Photobucket Hotlik Fix,

chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/photob...oapbifiaedg?hl=en-US

I just LOVE that this website makes photo posting easy and does not require us to mess around or pay for photo hosting!