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Re: Forum Photographs

Good idea. I think this is a shot over the bows for practice generally, as it emphasises that the image collections need to appropriately archived in folders ready for transfer to another party "in personal space" first and foremost.

i.e. we all need to safeguard those images with some sort of guardianship.

After worrying that other web archival activity would damage the forum, I'm very glad I have started to put things together on the Nippy archive in 2015 as there is no way that some older threads here can be rejeuvenated now; some posters are no longer active, let alone being able to navigate a new image posting system. What needs to happen is for 'specialists' to trawl the old thread posts for gems, to save them and find new images to support them in a different format perhaps. Hard work. Perhaps this could be managed if the forum ever transfers to new space with its own image server - but we don't really know whats happening...

As some of the photobuckets of restoration images of Nippies are becoming inaccessible, I have now wondered about setting up a free Wordpress.com blog site shell, so that individuals could host and upload their own sections as a co-operative venture for restoration images, or detailed image collections of unrestored cars.

This could equally well be done by some with minor computer skills (no new software needed - just time and a broadband line), for other models, or areas of specialism.


Re: Forum Photographs

As a backup, could restoration photos etc. be stored in the "Online Austin Seven Archive" from the Austin Seven Clubs' Association?

Location: Oxfordshire

Re: Forum Photographs

Just to bring this reminder to the top again.

Cheers, Tony.

Location: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Re: Forum Photographs

Without making any form of commitment, the idea of expanding the Archive web site to include greater details of each specific model had already gone through my mind, but didn't want to tread on the toes of people already doing excellent work using Pinterest etc. It maybe something that the Archive Project could look into in the future but just as a guide, I'd be interested to hear from any of you that are running such collections as to whether you would be happy to transfer your resources..

Hugh

Location: lubenham

Re: Forum Photographs

Hugh, that strikes me as an excellent idea particularly if it safeguards the collections from what has just happened with so many of us on Photobucket.

Location: NZ

Re: Forum Photographs

Just a reminder about greedy photobucket and Forum pictures- not that many should need it.

The suggestion by Hugh sounds interesting if we can get hold of the missing pictures from some valuable early postings.

The comment about Pinterest postings also raises the question of any possible future changes here.

I hope not, but recent events make me a little concerned about these remote based storages.

Cheers, Tony.

Location: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Re: Forum Photographs

I think any Free service is going to be problematic as when their advertising model fails so does the service. I also think remote storage is fine as long as you are prepared to pay a fee for it. That said unfortunately I use Google and pay for it but it is not compatible with this forum.

Location: Rokeby, Victoria, Australia

Re: Forum Photographs

Not sure that paying for a service is a great help.

The club website used a paid for hosting by Ilysis which ran well for some years.

Recently Ilysis was taken over by Uber who were then bought by Netregistry who were bought by Melbourne IT.

During this waltz they changed a few things which effectively stopped the website working last year, taking many hours of phone calls over a few weeks to sort.

Finally it settled down until the next change which again took more hours on the phone to sort.

I suppose at least the system still runs which is more than can be said for the free photobucket!

Cheers, Tony.

Location: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Re: Forum Photographs

Might be worth mentioning that I help build very large websites for a living, last few jobs have been Guardian, Telegraph and currently at PhotoBox where we manage millions of images per day.

Some (boring) stuff to take into account that might help;

1. Remote photo hosting, I would suggest Flickr, it's big, has a decent service and is easy enough to share images from. I don't imagine it will will be failing any time soon! It maybe that once Ruaridh is back from his travels we update the image posting sticky post to reflect this, (or whatever choice is felt to be the best.)

2. Fixing the Bravenet "problem". This has been discussed ad infinitum and the "management" are apparently doing something. One thing it is worth knowing though is that at some point Bravenet implement a policy for every post that is added to the forum one will be deleted. Last time I had access to the numbers we were starting to get close to this limit.

3. Creating a "new" forum is relatively easy, IMHO best bet it to use one of the existing off the shelf solutions, (PHPBB etc.).
- Migrating the existing content is the hard bit, especially the task of attributing posts to the right people.
- To get the content you have to set "crawlers" to go and read and save each post and it's information, then reformat that for the new forum software and "post" it automatically. In theory part of this service could find the photobucket images and flag them up for moving / url changing but that would be a big piece of work!
- I have offered many times to host this and am happy to do it, but I don't want to be seen as leading a coups d'état!
- "Self hosting" the images is possible, but would need to keep an eye on how much space they take up, (even an Iphone image can be 18mb each).

4. Pinterest works in that it doesn't host the original image itself, (unless you directly upload). It makes a thumbnail and then links through to the original image.

Location: Buxted, East Sussex