The problem I see with using a
free third party imiage hosting service is that you (and all forum members) are at the mercy of that hosting company. Often they (understandably) imipose their own bandwidth restrictions that could take one or more of your pictures offline, either temporarily or permanently.
Steve has asked us not to host images externally, and instead, to upload them all onto the forum, so that the images don't disappear months or years later. Steve often points people to threads that contain photos that illustrate important points, so when those pictures disappear, it's quite a loss for the community here.
I must confess that I have been hosting my images off the forum for a while now, and (sorry Steve!
) I'm continuing to do so. The difference in my case is that
I'm paying for the hosting through GoDaddy.com. I'm paid up for three years and I'll most likely continue my hosting arrangements with them for years to come. One of the benefits of my hosting them at GoDaddy is that
I am using their photo album software called Coppermine that, among other things, automatically resizes images to a size that you specify. So that I can automatically include images on this forum, I set the "intermediate" image width to 700 pixels wide, as per John's request.
I have also made a commitment to myself that if ever I change my manner of image hosting (i.e., change hosting providers and/or change online photo album software that changs the URLs of my images), I will painstakingly go through my entire marathon thread and manually change each image URL to the updated one. Hopefully that never happens!
I realize that what I am doiong rather complicated for a lot of people, so I'm not necessarily prescribing what I am doing as a recommendation. I did, however, want to point out that although hosting images off site does have some advantages (not the least of which is being able to position the images inline, meaning not always at the end of the post), there are other risks and costs, not the least of which is the possibility that the images will disappear forever. That may be OK for one's family vacation photos, but when the photos are extremely valuable reference material, the risks may be too great.
--Keith