I have just received a nasty shock, as I guess have other U.K. members.

I just tried to upload an image to my Imgur account only to find that it is no longer available to U.K users! What kind of dirty trick is that? Every image I have posted on MTS and elsewhere is stored on Imgur, there are thousands of them. What am I to do now? How can I ever finish my Lucy story? This is a disaster!

At the moment images that I have downloaded to MTS are still showing here, but how long will that continue? Fortunately I have backups of everything, but how I am to post them to MTS now I cannot imagine.

I am very upset. And I expect many others are too. My deepest sympathies to all of them.

EDIT: I was wrong. I just checked my story thread and all the images are already gone! After all the effort I have put into this project everything is ruined!

This has ramifications I didn’t anticipate when I heard of this yesterday morning. Cannot confirm (American) but apparently embeds from Imgur don’t work either from what I’m reading? I use Imgur to store pretty much everything from Minecraft skins to screenshots, and people in the UK won’t be able to see images across so many forum websites such as this one.
I’m gonna stay out of politics (not my lane, especially as an American who can’t even tell apart the ideologies in the UK) on this hereinafter, but what I would suggest is hosting your images somewhere like in a GitHub repo. A rational person would think that GitHub, a website for hosting source code, shouldn’t be classified as adult content, so I think it’s safe.

I had thought of using Flickr, and I have just started an account there. Trouble is I can't afford to go pro, and the free version is limited to 1000 images. I'm going to need more than that.

If Discord didn’t change the way it handled images (links get recycled every week; images are better referenced by message ID and attachment index which is not possible to do outside of Discord), I would have suggested that.
Let me reference an image from GitHub really quickly.

Okay, so that did work. I don’t think GitHub has a file limit.

I know my solution is unorthodox, but that’s kind of my thing, lol.

Well, I've just opened a Git-Hub account, so I'll give it a try. I want to explore a few other options though. Thanks for your help.

If I do find a less clunky solution (i.e., that with an actual image posting website), I'll let you know ASAP. I just figured in the meantime, that would suffice if you have the patience to set up a GitHub repository and add images as files to it.

Thank you both for your sympathies and your suggestions. At the moment I feeling quite wretched, all the joy having suddenly been sucked out of the game .There was a time when I used to play off line, all on my lonesome, but that proved a rather barren sort of business. A great part of the pleasure of the sims games, as I now realise, lies in sharing experiences and creations with other simmers. I couldn't do without that now.

For now I shall have to console myself with chatting and posting things to Discord till I can find a solution.

You could likely use a VPN for now, and for simple browsing any free one will do. There's even some browsers with one built in.
As the images and account haven't actually been taken down, they just aren't visible in your region anymore. At the very least, you can use this to log in and make backups of any images you don't have saved locally.

I'd suspect it to be temporary until Imgur adheres to UK laws, but indeed there are many alternatives.
Any kind of blog, even a private/hidden one, can be used for that kind of thing. I even host some images in my Tumblr drafts :p

I hope you're right about it being temporary: one can but hope.

Meanwhile that's a good notion about using a VPN. I have Opera installed and that has its own VPN. I'll give it a try. Also I'll try using tumblr. Thanks for the ideas.

@CardinalSims

Well, I've reposted the images for the two chapters of 'Queen Lucy' using new links from my private Tumblr blog. I never realised I could do that. I couldn't bear looking at the wreckage any longer! This is temporary, until I can find some more permanent solution. But at least I can turn my attention back to Chapter 3, which WAS taking shape before I so rudely interrupted. Thank you again for that idea.

I've been having a re-think about how I can go about this project and how I can make use of Tumblr. If i post the main story chapters here on MTS I can use the blog to host additional background material: extracts from 'ancient documents'; local legends and historical records - that sort of thing. And I'll include links to them where appropriate. I've a number of ideas in mind.

Late. but you can host using Tumblr. Just set the images to private and right click them!

Edit: Nevermind I cannot read apologies.

@XnixnBvg

I've started doing this with all my 'special' families: the Fordyces, the Darkes and my 'royal' family (Pengaraths). For anything else I will use the uploader. I shan't bother with anything I posted to older threads that are no longer active, it's too much of an undertaking. It was a big enough job when Tinypic disappeared!

Thanks anyway.

And the mother of all disappointments: PhotoBucket. So many lost Sims 2 Stories