Long-term photo storage question

[mjet]

I know that we've all seen it - you do a search for some obscure question and you find it on an online forum. You go there, and the posting is 2-3 years old. There were photos posted but they were probably linked from eBay or some other site that has now gone down, so the photos aren't there any longer.

Personally, I have a website so I put things that I link to there and leave them there long-term. But many don't (especially when linking to eBay photos or links from temp pages). Is there any way to automate, from the mod side, that a backup of copies are stored somewhere (like an offsetguitars photobucket site, something free)? I have a feeling that this might be a manual operation which would make it virtually impossible. But maybe you programming whizzes can think of something...

[mezcalhead]

My comp sci final project was partly a screen scraper .. it shouldn't be too hard to automate a bot to investigate all of the picture links on the site and save copies of the pictures somewhere. However, I wouldn't be too sure how to determine when the links become obsolete and then redirect the link to the stored image.

Where you store them is an issue also .. either on a server we pay for which misses the whole point of having external links in the first place, or on a picture hosting site like photobucket in which case you run the same risk of having your linked pictures go down, except then it would be the whole lot of them at once instead of piecemeal.

Perhaps the answer would be one bot that collects pictures and stores them on an admin's hard drive, and another one that flags up expired links. Then an expired link would have to be manually redirected and the picture placed on something like photobucket .. leaving the backups still stored as well.

[zhivago]

it would be great if there was a way to do all this

I will keep all my linked pics up for as long as I run againstperfection.net, which is also my portfolio site (so it shouldn't be going anywhere anytime soon!)

I think pictorial content can really make a site stand out, and that is one of the reason I've been posting loads of threads with pics

[mjet]

I will keep all my linked pics up for as long as I run againstperfection.net, which is also my portfolio site (so it shouldn't be going anywhere anytime soon!)

I think pictorial content can really make a site stand out, and that is one of the reason I've been posting loads of threads with pics

I also try and find a place on my website where I can dump photos to be used on forums but many don't - eBay links are a good example. I was once looking for a specific photo that I'd seen on eBay two years before. I found a forum that had a link but - alas - the link was also down. I kicked myself for not saving the photo directly (I'm better about this now).

I agree about photo content - so long as everyone shrinks their photos down so that they'll fit on a standard page and not require a horizontal slider (a real pet peeve of mine!).

[nealescott]

www.flickr.com is your friend!