Whereas storage capacity and related cost is one issue to address, another important issue is perennity of the picture posted:
- when using
direct upload, pics are glued to the Forum and remain there; they can be removed by the poster himself if he so decides;
- when using
remote hosting, pics are put into a box that is located offsite and we use the address of the box to link the pic to the Forum; each photo has its own particular address, so there is one pic per box;
if for whatever reason, the poster moves the pic out of that particular box (because he deletes it or simply rearranges his boxes, the link remains in place on the Forum but the box is empty and the poster would have to recreate a new link and replace the old one in his post, for the pic to remain active on the Forum.
Unfortunately there are many instances in our Forum where pics have been moved and hence can no longer be seen.
In the tables below you see how that works. When the pic is moved into another box, the intitial box which carries the link remains empty. Moving may be done intentionally but also inadvertently (for instance when you reorganize your folders and boxes on Photobucket or thelike.
This brings up the difficulty to convert the current Forum into an archive including pics, unless the archive would be like a PDF by scanning all pages of the Forum as they are viewed.
I am not an IT specialist, there may be ways to do this.