Social media presence

So yesterday I dropped off my El Camino project car at a relatively local startup body shop.  I wasn't planning on paying someone else to do the body work, but a lot of little business like that are struggling right now and thanks to some big financial changes we made last fall the wife and I are in pretty good shape to help.

The shop is just starting out, and my beater ute is going to be their first really decent size project so they are posting a lot of pictures on the book of faces. Two questions:

Is there a good way to link to those pictures or share them in a way that would drop them into a build page here? My experience with that ecosystem is that outside links don't really "link" very well, at least not for me. 

Should we have, or do we have and I have just missed it, a recommendations link thread? Pages on bookface, YouTube channels, Instagram feeds, etc... that we like and think other GRMers would like in one spot? 

My personal feeds are full of random stuff anyway; I would certainly love to help bolster the numbers for a small business that was working on fixing up one of your cars, or building a chopper for one of you, or pouring the slab for your new shop.  Something about that extra connection might matter to more than just me?

As long as they are public, you can just copy the image address and either enter it when you click on "add image" above (the rectangle that looks like a mountain range with a sun in the upper left corner), or bracket it with the [img][/img] tags. 

That is how I share most of my images. 

Our site supports local photo hosting; just drag and drop (or click the image icon) and you can upload directly to the forum. That's easier and way less likely to break in a few months than hosting elsewhere. Plus, it's free!

In reply to Tom Suddard :

Free to us. We should never forget that GRM is paying for the server to support photo hosting on this "free" website.

In reply to oldopelguy :

I used to link a bunch of Facebook images but I was told they often don't appear for some people.

Create a folder on your local drive, right-click on each image from the social media of your project, and save it to that folder.  Then make posts as you would, and to insert the images, do so as you normally would except click on the UPLOAD tab rather than the default Image Info or Link tabs.  Upload from your project folder and they will be permanently hosted on GRM's server.  As a bonus you will collect your own copies.for posterity.

Then you can link in the text to the actual web / FB / whatever posts about the project.

Good on you for giving them this opportunity.

The reason is that a bunch of us use plugins like Facebook Container to alleviate tracking issues on non-FB sites, and that tends to block pictures linked directly from FB as well.

I've found that any picture I linked from FB in the past has disappeared from posts, regardless of plugins or containers. After a while, they just go away.

So save them and upload them to the GRM server. That's the only way to be sure they'll be available...for as long as GRM decides to host them, anyhow. That will likely be for at least the lifespan of the current iteration of this forum.

One of the reasons I host my own pictures on my own website.  However, I am paying for my own web hosting, whereas FB and GRM host for free. 

We will never forget: Photobucket - "the Destroyer of Build Threads."