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

[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.