Photo Hosting for Posting Pics

[BigSteve22]

I looked into using Imgur some time ago. Here is why I don't use them.

From their terms of service...

don't use Imgur to host image libraries you link to from elsewhere, content for your website, advertising, avatars, or anything else that turns us into your content delivery network. If you do – and we will be the judge – or if you do anything illegal, in addition to any other legal rights we may have, we will ban you along with the site you're hotlinking from, delete all your images, report you to the authorities if necessary, and prevent you from viewing any images hosted on Imgur.com.

That's interesting, I hadn't seen that concern brought up before.  I wonder how much traffic you have to generate to get on their radar.  Might have to go back to Dropbox just to avoid any potential future unpleasantness.  ???

I think we're looking at this wrong, Imgur's terms say:

"...don't use Imgur to host image libraries you link to from elsewhere, content for your website, advertising, avatars, or anything else that turns us into your content delivery network...."

To me, seems like they're referring to things like using Imgur to host the catalog photos for your online web site sales. Linking to the libraries for things like that would be an unreasonable use of their "free" service. On the other hand, Imgur automatically generates BB links to individual photos for you to copy and post elsewhere. I don't think what we do here is violating Imgur's terms.

But then again, an attorney I ain't!  :-\

 

[Cagey]

It says "we will be the judge", which implies there are no objective numbers/behaviors involved, it will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. If they see somebody's account is generating 500GB/mo of traffic, they may wonder why and look at the origin/destination addresses to see what kind of behavior is taking place. If the list is very long, they could infer you're running an online catalog that may need numerous images per user, and ask you to please subscribe to a CDN or start hosting your own resources.

 

[Sovereign_13]

Maybe it's just me being even slightly tech-savvy, but I never assumed things I put on the Internet were private.  I'm sure Google reads/mines/crawls my emails for stuff to put in ads.  I'm fully aware that Facebook sells my likes/interests data to advertisers.  Listening to Zuckerberg explain how social media works to Congress was painful - Facebook, Twitter, and company are all businesses that offer free-to-use platforms.  How do people think they make money?  :icon_scratch:

Regardless, I guess I'll worry about the Imgur issue if and when it becomes an issue.  I have like...6 photos hosted on Imgur, and while I'm sure there will be (hopefully) many more in the future, the number of pictures and links I'd have to generate to be more than noise in the traffic metrics is probably ridiculous for a single person.