I'm about to post this in general airgun:

As BBS regulars will know, I have a free vintage airguns image gallery that uses pics donated freely by BBS members and others around the world.

It’s taken a long time to upload pics, but I’ve done it gradually, spending a few minutes most days rather than spend hours at a time.

The latest Photobucket debacle – in which they are making a ransom demand to keep embedded links alive for all but the most expensive paid-for service – has made me think it’s time to cut loose from providers that could go bust, disappear etc.

I’d rather not have to start again from scratch, but do appreciate that might be the only option.

While the Photobucket website has been an ad-entangled hell-hole for a while, embedded ‘3rd party links’ have completely escaped the ads and PB just put up with the bandwidth drain. No longer, sadly…

Unfortunately, because my galleries evolved from something quite small - starting in 2009 - incrementally over a long time, I just went with the flow and used pic hosting rather than using my own storage.

Now I need the help of BBS techies to come up with a different solution. Please only reply if you can address the specifics of the issue, in fairly simple language, rather than ‘I use xxxx provider and they’re great’. Please also don’t use this thread to whinge about how awful Photobucket has become and how you could see it coming years ago...

The problem:

To transfer the existing images to a sustainable platform independent of fickle commercial providers, with the least possible hassle, if possible maintaining the current gallery structure or near enough. (I’ve had Piwigo/Lightroom suggested for software?)

This may simply involve having the images stored in a place other than Photobucket, while keeping the Network54 web hosting (it's been going for 18 years so far), or having the entire gallery hosted elsewhere.

A desired solution:

Make the gallery periodically downloadable by visitors, ideally in a searchable, user-friendly format, to ensure the survival of the gallery intact. As it grows, I could ‘publish’ updated versions for download.

Anything that involves downloading images or ‘gallery entries’ individually is no good – it would have to be the whole gallery that is downloadable at once, or a version of it.

Objectives:

The main objectives are simplicity and future-proofing. The less time it takes me to transfer the gallery from the existing format, the better. The cost is also important – under, say, £200 a year would be manageable.

To save me time, several non-techie vintage airgun enthusiasts would ideally be enlisted to help with the transfer effort, preferably with a minimum of fuss or technical know-how required. I could forward them folders of images to be uploaded, with instructions as to where they should end up and under what heading etc.

Thanks!