[russellw]

There are a couple of options open to those with build threads or tech docs that contained images hosted by photobucket.

Simplest. We can remove the current daily image restrictions on the AFF gallery as this allows bulk uploads of images to a users gallery space (which will still have to be restricted to some sort of size per user) and then I can run database queries to redirect the image URL's to that gallery space. It's a bit finite for space as we only have ~650 Gb of space currently available but it's workable as a solution and we can possibly add more disk (albeit probably only another 1TB) without much difficulty and at not much cost.

There are a couple of riders for that one (or indeed most of these). The images are going to have to have the same image name as they had on photobucket and they need to be in the users personal gallery space.

A bit harder. We can set up a public SFTP space on our server. Same space limitations as above and again it would need to be space limited to 'something' per user but it's easily accessible with a client like WinSCP which provides a Windows Explorer style interface and supports bulk upload to that FTP space. Images can then be linked directly from that space and the URL's of existing images fixed the same way as above with the only proviso that image names need to be unchanged.

Fiddly but workable. Users can migrate their existing images to a new image hosting service and we can again (probably) amend the URL's as long as they don't do something stupid with the naming and they support HTTPS. All the same riders apply as above with the added proviso that they must support 3rd party linking which not everyone will do.

Harder but probably best long term: We can just set up a dedicated image hosting server with our ISP that is in the same domain space as AFF so that it acts like a subdomain and images won't be seen as 3rd party links. It's got a cost attached to it so it would have to be chargeable based on storage size. As a guide, adding 4Tb of scalable backed up NAS or SAN storage is going to cost about 75 cents / Gb so allowing for some overhead and 60% utilisation we'd need to be looking at something around $1.50 per Gb per annum in (say) blocks of 5 Gb. We could put an image management app on the front of our current server backed onto that storage to make uploading and managing images simple. It's a bit of work to get it set up but it is feasible.

Cheers
Russ