Disappearing pictures

First let me say that I have been on this site for quite a while and for some reason I had not seen the “Shuffle” button until tonight. There goes the whole evening. Lots of really amazing stuff on here that I hadn’t seen before.

I did come across a problem though when looking at some of the older entries. Because projects are the only place where the pictures are hosted on Lumberjocks they are disappearing from some forum topics and blogs.
One example I came across today was the last entry of Timbo's blog on his basement redesign. I get a message that says “This image or video has been moved or deleted.”

The same thing happened in the replies to this forum topic about how to use Photobucket.

I believe that this must occur when a user no longer has their online picture hosting account active.

There are also a lot of other forum topics about the pros and cons of photos being hosted on other sites and the ease of use of Lumberjocks forums and blogs because of this.

Posting on my LJ Blog
Photo To Big
Posting Photos — Has To Be An Easier Way
Posting Photos

I have no idea how the technical aspects of websites work but I’m just worried that we are losing a little bit of Lumberjocks.com each day as people let their image hosting accounts lapse. If the pictures were hosted on Lumberjocks in a manner similar to the project photos they would remain with the site.

Just my two cents.

-- Kyle Shipp, http://battleshipp.blogspot.com