Uploading images from smartphone

[Jon Buchan]

How do I upload images from a bog standard smartphone please. I can't see any 'attach' images button apart from http site. Thanks

[Out2gtcha]

Hi Jon,

To get pictures to display you will need an image hosting service, such as Flickr, Imgur, Smug Mug or the like, as LSP does not support direct picture uploads to our servers.

 

Hoping that helps, and let us know if you need any further assistance!

[John1]

Whilst on the subject, always wondered why we can't do direct uploads.   Is it a limitation of the forum server or a decision by the guy(s) in charge?

[Dave Williams]

1 minute ago, John1 said:

Whilst on the subject, always wondered why we can't do direct uploads.   Is it a limitation of the forum server or a decision by the guy(s) in charge?

One reason is to prevent hackers from uploading malicious code via an attachment.  ARC got taken down for like a week many years ago because someone did this.  Also, it reduces the storage requirements on the LSP servers when the images are hosted somewhere else.

[LSP_Kevin]

1 hour ago, John1 said:

Whilst on the subject, always wondered why we can't do direct uploads.   Is it a limitation of the forum server or a decision by the guy(s) in charge?

 

We used to allow it up until around 2011 or so, but disabled it for two very important reasons. The first was security - especially after ARC was badly hacked due to a malicious image upload. While these types of hacks are rare these days, they're still a risk, and given that we ourselves were hacked in 2022 (resulting in my having to re-upload a backup of the entire forums from scratch), it's not a risk we're willing to take.

 

The second reason, and a much more "close and present" one, concerns server resources - specifically, storage space. At the point where we disabled image uploads in 2011, we had over 110,000 image files on the server, and it was growing fast. That rate of growth would have forced us to disable uploads eventually anyway, as we inevitably ran out of server space. (As an aside, it also makes backing up the site quite difficult - only 2 days ago I discovered over 14,000 images that were missing from my backup.) We still need to have space available for all the articles and reviews we publish on the main website, along with the image resources needed for the Kit and Reference databases.

 

Kev