Our own image hosting instead of Photobucket
As I've been planning out upgrades to the site, I've been thinking about doing my own image hosting for not only the car photos (instead of Flickr) but also for images you guys share in the forum instead of making you use Photobucket or some other external solution.
Hosting images myself gives me many more options when it comes to displaying images as well as making the site faster since I won't have to rely on external web servers to load the photos.
So for those that do a lot of photo sharing here, are you married to places like Photobucket now or would you consider cutting over to an in-site solution?
Right now off-site hosting of images is the only option and that was by design to avoid all the extra space but that plan is starting to show problems as I want to do more with content and photos throughout the site.
Just curious...so if you don't mind sharing your thoughts I'd appreciate it. My motivation here is mostly technical but if there's a good chance a feature like this wouldn't be used then I won't bother building it.
Discussion
ditto, from photobucket to here and back and forth has been a pain to us non-computeresque types...
If everything goes as planned, any references to Photobucket images will still work and be fine - you won't have to use anything new if you don't want to. And then you shouldn't have to copy all your Photobucket photos over to the new system.
Also, just as a side note - RLD-hosted images would not be able to be served outside of the redlinederby.com web site, so you couldn't post the images on other sites using the redlinederby.com web address. Serving images can suck up a lot of bandwidth and I have to be careful how much I use. In the rare case someone would post an image on a high-traffic web site, it would be hitting RLD every time that image is viewed and that could be a ton, dinging me with extra cost, not to mention it would the web site a lot slower.
I think that would be awesome, I most certainly would use it.