On image hosting, and, more particularly, bulk LJ-editing.

[theweaselking]

So, my image host of choice since 2004 have been getting worse and worse, and more annoying, and removing features, and making their web page suck more and more. Still, I've been putting up with it, until the most recent change: They're hijacking clicks and redirecting image views, coming on the URLs of paying customers, to annoying pages with ads on them.

And it's just plain annoying. What I want is someone who will host pictures for me, then serve those pictures. That's all. I'm willing to pay for it, and I *have* been paying for it. And they insist on fucking it up.

So I'm thinking of changing providers. Downloading every picture from a decade's worth of albums is actually not all that hard, and neither is uploading them somewhere else, but when I stop dealing with this company this will break *every link*, and I've been diligent about rehosting content for, again, most of 10 years. And I'm sure as hell not editing the URLs in 17,000 posts by hand.

So rather than have 80% of my journal history go blank, I want a way to:
1) Download my whole journal, like with lj-archive
2) search for img src tags with certain patterns
3) replace those tags with a new one. For example, taking http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v620/theweaselking/main8/90QIUQt_zps3e99d082.jpg~original and turning it into http://lordofweasels.net/pictures/main8/90QIUQt_zps3e99d082.jpg~original
4) editing those journal entries and posting them back up to LJ.

(Now, their INCREDIBLY annoying habit of adding "~original" to the end of the file names might have to be edited, but that's only a couple of months old *and* if I can turn it into the first, I can take out the ~original and regex-rename the files themselves.)

Is there a tool for bulk journal entry editing of this sort?

Comments

[pavel-lishin.livejournal.com]

Well, assuming that Livejournal supports an export-and-then-import action (I don't know if they do, I only use it to comment on family LJs at this point), then the replacements could be done on the command line with some magical combination of sed, awk and grep. Ask your local nerd.

And if you use Amazon S3 to store your images, you can also set up rules that forbid hotlinking: http://s3browser.com/working-with-amazon-s3-bucket-policies.php

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The problem is making sure that I change nothing about the post except the target URL, so it re-posts right back in the same spot. I'm not sure that function exists.

I have a couple of different possible places to store the pictures. I'm just annoyed at Photobucket for making their interface worse and hijacking my clicks to show ads.

(And nah, I'm not really concerned about hotlinking. I know how to do hotlink protection, but I generally don't bother.)

[pavel-lishin.livejournal.com]

Well, S3 isn't free - so you might care about hotlinking if you see your bill suddenly jump from $3/month to $50/month.

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

I think it's the bulk re-upload that would be the killer.

[pheonix7284.livejournal.com]

Would http://ljsec.livejournal.com/ be of use? I've not tried it but claims you can do editing and uploading for bulk changes.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

I've wondered why you use lordofweasels for music but not images. For easier browsing?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Legacy reasons, basically. I had photobucket *long* before I had a domain name. And for a while, I had the kind of traffic where a photobucket account wouldn't complain but my domain would. Neither of those is true now, but that hasn't compelled me to change.

[skington.livejournal.com]

Might be worth setting up e.g lordofweasels.net/images/whirr_94 as a redirect to (currently) http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v620/theweaselking/main8/90QIUQt_zps3e99d082.jpg~original so, if you decide to move all the images again, you don't have to update the links again, you just need to update your master list of redirects.

[ashbet]

If you figure out a clever way to do this, I'd love to know about it -- I'm planning on leaving Flickr due to my disgust over some of their recent corporate decisions (specifically, throwing longterm paid users under the bus in favor of "making free accounts more attractive in order to sell advertising space on them"), but my main hesitation is that even making all my Flickr photos private would cause all the links to break.

(I note that this is not an accidental decision on their part -- there is no other reason why changing the security settings on my *account* should cause all of my *URLs* to change, to my knowledge.)

I'd still like my LJ to work properly, though, and I do still search through past posts for photos that I might have otherwise forgotten the search terms for (some of which are on Flickr, others are elsewhere), so I'd prefer to just (a) back the whole thing up, and (b) change image hosts and bulk-change the URLs if possible.

-- A <3

[skington.livejournal.com]

In slightly more detail, this is what you'd do.

First of all, you need to have your own domain (which our esteemed host does), and sufficient access to the domain's website configuration that you can set up a list of redirections of e.g. http://yourdomain.whatever/image/tag to http://some.other.provider/long/and/complex/url?with=other&stuff=and&apparently-meaningless-numbers=deadbeef

Then you start building up a list of those tags in a text file. Its exact format will depend on your setup, but in general you should have, on each line, a tag (e.g. 'exploding_chicken') and a URL (whatever Flickr decides your URLs look like), plus possibly some standard boilerplate like 'RedirectMatch' or whatever.

Whenever you upload a new image you want to share, you update this list and upload it to your web server. Then you share your own URL - e.g. http://yourdomain.whatever/image/exploding_chicken - rather than the Flickr URL, or whoever you're using.

This means that you now control what happens behind the scenes: people come to your links, and you determine where you send them. You don't have to tell everyone to update their links; you just say "this link will always go to where this photo is hosted".

If it turns out that Flickr, or whoever you're with at the moment, changes their URLs, then chances are the change will be a consistent one - e.g. all flickr links have '&private=mwahahahaha' added, or whatever. You can just load your list of tags into a text editor and use search and replace. Re-upload the tags list to your webserver and the links will be fine again.