Topic: Reliable image hosting sites (paid or otherwise) that WON'T alter your file?

[TerraEsperZ]

Hey everyone. Sorry for the major radio silence over the last several months. It's become increasingly harder to motivate myself to map (or play, or read, or do anything that's not a professional or social obligation really) so there's probably something messed up with my body or something. Guess I should get that checked out...

Anyway, the meat of my question, for the umpteenth time since I've started making videogame maps, is *where* oh where can I host all the images I want to share with you guys? I've become so discouraged by having one hosting site after another disable hotlinking (which I'd understand for large images, but even for thumbnails?) or suddenly reduce the size and quality (but no the file size!?) of everything I'd uploaded that I just stopped sharing anything I was doing lately. Granted, I wasn't accomplishing much, but I probably would have posted something if only to inspire the kind of technical discussions that used to be so frequent here years ago.

From what I've gathered, what I apparently want is a CDN, a content delivery network, but I'll be honest in that I don't know what that is, how to get one, much less how to get one that's suited to me, and the hassle behind the whole concept makes me want to not even start looking. ALL I WANT IS A PLACE I CAN HOST FILES THAT ARE SEVERAL THOUSAND PIXELS IN RESOLUTION AND A FEW MEGABYTES IN SIZE THAT WILL GIVE ME THUMBNAILS FOR LINKS AND WON'T ALTER THE FILES THEMSELVES. I'll even pay for it, in the hopes that said sites won't close down like so many others before it.

Am I asking for too much? I'm just so tired of dealing with this shit, which I recognize is incredibly unimportant shit in the grand scheme of things. But it's yet one more factor on top of the pile of stuff that's sapping my motivation.

Can anyone help?

[feos]

You can not guarantee it will keep allowing hacky ways to embed the pictures, but it is kinda reliable in that they won't alter the files you send them. But no thumbnail.

https://sourceforge.net/p/feos-tas/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/Misc/TerraEsperZ.PNG?format=raw



Also, version control services are mandatory for dedicated geeks.

[Maxim]

It's 2016, don't use Sourceforge. Github is presumably the answer. Both will be unhappy to store many gigabytes of revisions, though.

[TerraEsperZ]

Sorry for taking a month and a half to reply (it actually felt way longer). Turns out I'm probably suffering from sleep apnea (this diagnosis is about to be confirmed) and this is why I'm basically never getting enough rest despite sleeping more than average, and why I've been experiencing signs of depression (lack of motivation, patience, concentration, etc) since around summer. Believe me, I've been trying *really* hard to motivate myself to get back into mapping but I've ended up spending quite a bit of my free time "vegging out" instead. Anyway...

I've actually managed to spring into action a bit today and finally moved most of my more recent map galleries over to Imgur and updated a bunch of my posts to reflect that. Since their policy on hotlinking isn't exactly clear, I chose to have every thumbnail link to the full album for a given game, since linking directly to the images would prevent them from making any money from ads and I *would* appreciate Imgur staying in business as long as possible.