The NikonGear Office > Help Desk

[Solved] Linked original images from Zenfolio has stopped displaying

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Øivind Tøien:
Yes, I am aware of the problem of course. One need to be very committed to stick to the image hosting site when linking external images and not move images around in a way that can break the links. (The problem in this case was a temporary configuration issue by the site, not on my end). Free image hosting sites that come and go are problematic and should be avoided; one really need stability and good support and backup routines by the site.

However external linking has the big advantage when making reportage style posts of allowing text to be mingled with images and not have to correlate text description with a number of images bunched together as attachments at the end. That advantage should not be underestimated with respect to contributing to quality of NG posts.

I personally keep all images posted in different fora separated in different galleries on the hosting site that are dedicated to the specific forum only. (Also I keep a parallel gallery for each forum dedicated to more technically oriented images.) Thereby I can easily see which images I have posted in a particular forum before. And it ends up as a nice collection of images by itself.

Images posted on a site as attachments or stored on the site are not necessarily secure, it depends. The owner of the Astrobin image hosting and astronomy site learned that the hard way fairly recently when a system crash caused a rather large proportion of the hosted images on the site to be permanently lost. (A big loss for the astronomy society - many members thought they were safe and did not have them backed up locally.) The backup routines that were thought to be in place were not there, as was confirmed when he read the fine print of his server provider's conditions. In the discussion that followed it was pointed out a number of big server and cloud providers that had default schemes without adequate backup routines.

Birna Rørslett:
We are aware of those potential issues you mention. Regular backup is part of our VPS plan at our provider. Now and then I do an extra backup of the entire server, just in case.

Apparently it is our chosen forum software that puts the attachments at the end of the posts. Other software behave differently, e.g. at our "sister" site, UVP.

pluton:
It is my observation over ≈13 years of looking at photo forums that it is much more likely that linked images will become unavailable at some point, as compared to forum-stored images. It is a pity that the forum software limits the text + photos layout possibilities...I understand why one would want to use externally linked files for that reason.

Birna Rørslett:
Actually, you can "link" NG images posted elsewhere, for example this



and continue your post afterwards.

However, unless you have the image in your NG Gallery (for Supporters), it is a little on the convoluted side to manage :(

Bent Hjarbo:
Birna you made me look for the gallery, but I am not able to find any picture, I know that I have not uploaded any, but it should be possible to see other, right?

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