best photo hosting sites?

You can get your own domain.

It costs some bucks.

–B.G.–

that is not an option for me, but it seems like the only option.
i have no options.

Hi Justin

You may be asking too much. You need to understand that none of them are there to provide the service YOU want. They are all there to attract advertisers for the income that brings them, and that means you have to go through THEIR sequence and be exposed to THEIR ads. In other words, you are providing the means for them to earn money.

Cheers
PS: me, I keep my photos on my systems. If I want to access some of them when I am away – I take a decent USB drive with me.

If you don't want to manage your own domain, then you can use Zenfolio. You pay an annual subscription fee. You can make it a very private site and only allow access by friends or family. Or, you can make it a very public site. You can set it up to allow viewers to see your photos "in the clear" or you can allow viewers to see them with a big copyright symbol superimposed. You can set it up to allow viewers to order photo prints to be snail mailed to them.

–B.G.–

Some day we will expose Roger to the concept of "the cloud."

–B.G.–

deleted

Maybe take a look at smugmug.com they have a subscription cost but I think that they will do most of what you want

> Some day we will expose Roger to the concept of "the cloud."
Chuckle.
Been there, seen that – around mid-70s, with IBM mainframes. Nope, NO difference from today, except for scale. And except for the intrusion by the NSA of course.

Cheers
PS: I have been deep in the computing world since about 1970.

I use the Gallery application and GoDaddy — They were having one of their sales. There are probably cheaper hosting sites. There are other photo applications, but Gallery is fine for what I need. You control who see what, if they can comment, etc.

You can always buy a fixed IP, get an old desktop, install Apache and host your own site.
You won't even need to register a domain name.

"I have been deep in the computing world since about 1970."

Or, an IBM System 360 in 1968.

–B.G.–

Wow — maybe this book would come in handy…

Oh, the 360 came later. IBM 7044, DEC PDP-8, Ferranti Argus 500, …

Cheers

Justin – I think Flickr will let you post a direct link. Here’s one of my trip last week.

This is a direct link to the photo
https://www.flickr.com/gp/bogesdorfer/y8834g.

Is this what you are looking to do?

Here it is embedded.

@Daniel, as Justin (the OP) said… doing so is against flickr policies.

Sorry, guess I jumped in too quick and didn't read Flickr's rules. After reading them I do see that they want you to link back to flickr.

Onedrive, which used to be Skydrive allows for all of this. I believe that the first 7GB's is free.

Daniel, that is technically not a "direct link" as it links to a flickr page and not just an image. That wouldn't be a problem but flikr only provides a code in html and I need bbcode for standard forums.

Flickr does provide BBcode: click the "share" icon, then the icon that looks like a thumbtack.