LJ Scrapbook alternatives?

[ratcreature]

What are you all doing for image hosting these days? The recent news about developments with LJ brought home again the fact that there's a life cycle to websites and LJ hasn't been on an upswing for quite some time now. I haven't given LJ money for a while, reserving that for DW, but its Scrapbook is still what I use most to embed images.

(I haven't found a proper news announcement about their server move, but comment threads in the last DW maintenance post and on fail-fandomanon said that they've just moved their servers fully to Russia, and that they've been suspending/deleting LJs for political reasons? When looking for more info I've found mostly posts by Russian language LJs, some by former employees, like Anton Nossik, that I could only half-decipher via Google translate.)

Relatedly, does anybody know an easier way to back up your LJ Scrapbook than through the obnoxious interface? I've found some scripts from a few years ago, but they've changed Scrapbook since.

Comments

[ratcreature]

That's good to know, though sadly my usual pseud has been taken on their service.

So they aren't too finicky about copyright violations? A bunch of my images are drawing book scans for example, which I posted to illustrate my reviews of these, but technically I think it's more than is allowed for review purposes. I never had problems with these on LJ (though they object to copyright violations as well of course.)

Potentially with image hosting I also may run into trouble for my own stuff. I mean, my own fanart isn't pornographic, but I do have a few pieces that might count as sexually explicit by US standards, like showing naked cuddling and clothed sexual groping and such; also iirc I did some drawbles that technically have gore/mutilation (though since it isn't shock image-like but more the cartoon mutilation, it probably doesn't violate the spirit of their TOS). Do you know whether they are strict about the no nudity thing in their TOS?

But I also have my fanart (which is much less than my giant pile of shared rat pics and such) on my own website, and mostly link from there, despite it being a cheap webhost and sometimes glitchy. So that is less of an issue.

[ratcreature]

Most image hosting TOS are really restrictive, probably because it would be a lot more hassle to sort out just the stuff that might cause them actual legal trouble for distributing than to just blanket ban everything until you get to a super simple criterion. Like all the stuff deviantArt asks for such as proper model release forms and such if you show other people, and they only allow artistic nudity.

And of course as soon as a service is known as permissive, whether explicitly or for not enforcing their own rules, it gets used for porn a lot and then the advertisers may balk. I mean, I read that Tumblr has a porn problem, not because fandom, but because of general porn reposting that people don't have the rights to. But they by now they can't just ban every explicit pictures, because they built a user base that expects a permissive environment.

[yue_ix]

I've moved to a privately-owned server, in my case using paraka's offer a while back of hosting fellow fans. (That offer had been made for podficcers mostly, but she agreed to me and checked with the ToS of her host, DREAMHOST.com, that my 18+ fanart weren't in violations with their rules.)

Since it has FTP uploads and a lot of space, it offers me control over what I've uploaded but also freedom to upload a wider range of fanmedia - podfics, fanart, video tutorials, gifs, fics, ect, and sort them however I want.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, such a solution is certainly best. I have a website, but since my webhosting package is very much on the low budget side, it's not the most reliable, and I find uploading with ftp a bit tedious for the occasional picture. The LJ Scrapbook interface is awful for anything that involves multiple images, but if I just want to embed one it's still more convenient to do it all in the webbrowser. Even if it comes to bite you later when you have 400+ images in your "unsorted" pile in the LJ gallery...

[astridv]

I have the same problem. And it's not just finding a new site... what a pain in the ass it's gonna be to move all the hundreds of pics.

[ratcreature]

Yeah. And even if you have them elsewhere, you also need to edit all the entries. I don't think I'm going to give up Scrapbook as long as it still works, but I'd like an alternative to use from now on. I mean, things don't seem to look good for LJ.

And I don't even mean that they moved their servers (my guess is that they have to comply with that recent Russian data protection law for storing the private data of all their Russian users, and it is impractical and too expensive to keep servers in multiple locations), but that so far nobody has even cared to communicate about the glitches, updated the TOS, or did anything reassuring really, while all sorts of rumors circulate, doesn't fill me with confidence that the site owners are very interested in it anymore.

[astridv]

They haven't cared about their english-speaking users in a long time; Russia is where the site makes money. I don't expect any kind of customer service from sup because it's just not worth it to them to keep us as customers.

I'm not gonna give up Scrapbook either until I have to. It's just too useful for me.

[ratcreature]

Only I've looked at the Russian news comm too, and they haven't communicated there either.

I'm not actually sure that the site as such makes money at all. I think the main value by now must be that they can combine the demographic data with their search engine data and all that (after all by now SUP is merged with the Russian search engine Rambler iirc), and make better advertising money with ads there, as well as on the popular online news sites they have. Their model must be like Google's by now, not just ads on the site itself and a few paid accounts.

But I can well imagine that by now the added data for ad targeting isn't worth the hassle.

[mific]

I started laboriously moving fanart to photobucket today, even though I hate their interface moderately. If you r-click to open in new tab you can get a true direct link with no PB interface crap. Paying to lose the ads is also only about $10 per year. Played with tinypic and imgur but they have too few features for me like being able to add titles and readily organise works. So, 20 works dowm, 200 to go. Ugh.