A heads up for Imagestation users....

[Russian Blue]

If you link a photo from a forum such as PT directly back to your Imagestation album, you may be temporarily banned by Imagestation.

They are starting to cut people off from remote linking, and this just happened to a friend of mine today. You are still allowed to post a link directly back to your album (as a whole), but not directly link to a specific picture within an album.

I have no idea how many people they are banning or how long it is going to take for them to enforce this. Just thought I would give you a heads up!

So far I haven't received anything from Imagestation referring to my remote linking. Does anyone know a host that will allow their users to directly link back to an image??

[ChloeLove]

Oh no!!! This is awful!! :mad: :(

[ILoveMyAbbyGirl]

*wonders when she will get banned.. I will most likey forget...*

[aly]

Urrrrghhhh! Thats awful. I remember when we all used to post from Webshots until they stopped letting us. Time to find a new place to upload pics ..

[primabella]

That sucks!! :(

[binka_nugget]

GAH! I have over 300 pics on there! ARG, It's time to burn everything on a cd.

*shhh...*I don't know of any free hosts that allow direct linking but if you use angelfire and change your pic formats to .txt or .png, it works.

[Kfamr]

Althought it's a horrible name, Stranglethecat.com is easy to use and free. You just have to keep track of you image urls. Shutterfly.com is good as well.

[Barbara]

I'm afraid the cat site will be without pix then. But I noticed nothing up to now.

[krazyaboutkatz]

This is sad news. :( I sure hope that they'll some how overlook us here at Pet Talk.

[popcornbird]

Oh no! :(:( I just used imagestation to post pics of our trip though, and it worked fine. :confused: Where did you hear this? I've been burning CD's since yesterday so that I have all my pics on CD just in case of a virus. I'm glad I now have almost all my pics on CD's. They have their own CD case and its labelled picture album. :p Just one more CD to burn and I'll have all of them.

On Tiel Talk forum, people use a website called StarPhoto to post pics. They all love it. I'll see if I can find a link to that...

[primabella]

I got myself an account at Shutterfly. :)

Why would we need to burn our pictures on CD's? They won't allow direct linking but we can still have our pictures.

[Russian Blue]

This is the email that my friend received from Imagestation Customer Service:
____________________________________
Dear ***,

Your ImageStation account has been deactivated. This is most typically because there is unacceptable content in your account or you have created links on other websites that directly connect to files stored in your account. Please review the albums and Storage Bin in your account for the following situations and make corrections within 24 hours after reactivating your account:

Either,
1) Your account contains material that is not acceptable on ImageStation. Please review the sections titled "Member's Privileges And Obligations", "Member Content; Member Private Area; Community Area", and "Responsibility for Member Content"; and "Code of Conduct" in the ImageStation Membership Agreement. You will find a link to the Membership Agreement (http://www.imagestation.com/member/agreement.html) at the bottom of every ImageStation page.

Or,
2) You have placed links in other websites, forums, or chat groups to files stored on ImageStation. While it is permitted and encouraged to link directly to albums stored on ImageStation it is not permitted to link directly to the individual picture and video files.


To reactivate your account:

After reactivating your account, please remove all content that does not conform to the guidelines. We will review your account content 24 hours after you reactivate your account. All the images in your entire account will be deleted without further notice if any content does not conform to our guidelines. You will not be able to retrieve your images after we delete them.

Please follow these instructions to reactivate your account. If the following line is "active" in the email message (usually displayed as the color blue, like a link on a web page) just click on the line and your account will be immediately re-activated. If the link is not active, you will need to copy this line into the address bar of your browser.

....

Thank you,

ImageStation Customer Service
__________________________________



As I mentioned in my first post, I have no idea if they are enforcing this with every Imagestation account.

[RubyMutt]

Oh no!! :( I guess I'll be getting an account at shutterfly as well :(

[Cinder & Smoke]

Before we all rush over to Shutterfly...

If my foggy memory serves me...
*I* had a Shutterfly Account Waaaay back when...
and they started doing the same thing that ImageStation is now threatening to do =
BLOCK all links to an INDIVIDUAL Photo...

Pretty sure Shutterfly allowed a *link* to your ALBUM...
but individual photos were not allowed to link and display...

Maybe ImageStation is just after folks who post "lots" of pictures...
he said hopefully... :rolleyes:

[Kfamr]

I used Shutterfly while posting my Ohio/Michigan trip. It worked fine, you just have to share the pictures before posting.

[RubyMutt]

Originally posted by Kfamr
It worked fine, you just have to share the pictures before posting.

What do you mean? :confused:

[Kfamr]

Before it made me share the album (send it to someones email adress then use that link) before being about to let others see it.

[RubyMutt]

Oh, okay. Thanks :)

[Logan]

Right now, Shutterfly is working fine. I hope they won't change that anytime soon. I have hundreds of photos there! I have put many of them on Pet Talk recently with no problems.

Logan

[IttyBittyKitty]

Hey guys,

I don't think it's time for mass panic just yet! My guess is that RussianBlue's friend was probably linking to a site that was accessed by many people. If, for instance, you set your website's wallpaper by linking to Imagestation and you get a lot of hits, that is going to suck their bandwidth big time.

There are a lot of Pet Talkers, but I don't think that there are enough of us to make that kind of difference.

A good site I use for linking to Livejournal is village photos. For some reason, Livejournal does not like Imagestation. Here is the url:

http://members.villagephotos.com/index.asp

If it gets to the point that no one will let you link and they have ways around it, you just set up your own website like a geocities one and upload pictures to that. Otherwise, set up a router with its very own webserver. We have one, and I could probably store a few people's signatures at a pinch.

If it did come to that, perhaps Karen and Paul could even set up a service where you could store and delete a small number of pics for posting on this site for a wee price.

[Cinder & Smoke]

Originally posted by Logan
Right now, Shutterfly is working fine.
I hope they won't change that anytime soon...
I have put many of them on Pet Talk recently with no problems.

Didn't some of us try to use Shutterfly a couple years ago - before we found ImageStation?
I seem to remember that some folks did use Shutterfly for a while - but their photos were blocked after a period of time...???

If you read the fine print on Shutterfly...
it has the same thing that most of the other photo sharing sites have =

"3a. Access to your account
Your account with Shutterfly is available for your personal, non-commercial use. You can allow other people to view selected images in your account through Shutterfly’s on-line share feature. The people you invite to view your images through on-line share will be able to see the images you have selected for them and will not have access to your entire account.

Linking directly to images on Shutterfly’s servers from external sites is expressly prohibited. "

[krazyaboutkatz]

Thanks for the info IBK. :) I just signed up on the village photos site. I'll use this in case imagestation cancels me.

[slick]

I just signed up too. Have lots of pics to post with my kitties opening up their presents from Catmandu.....

[tomkatzid]

I want a place to upload the GIF's. I have done it on stranglethecat, but for some reason it doesn't work today. I signed up with ALL the others mentioned here and they won't work for animations.:confused: :confused: :confused: