GrrlScientist is an evolutionary biologist, ornithologist, aviculturist, birder and freelance science and nature writer. A native of the Pacific Northwest, she relocated from Seattle to NYC with her parrots after earning a BS in Microbiology (emphasis in Virology) and PhD in Zoology (Ornithology) from the University of Washington. In NYC, she was the Chapman Postdoctoral Fellow at the American Museum of Natural History for two years, pursuing part of her "dream" research project by reconstructing a molecular phylogeny of the parrots of the South Pacific islands. GrrlScientist and her five parrots are currently relocating to Germany, where she will continue writing her blog while also writing a book and learning German. (Meanwhile, her parrots will continue to nibble on her extensive personal library.) If you appreciate GrrlScientist's writing, you can help pay her living expenses by hiring her to "blog" your conference, speak at your club or write articles for your publication (or by clicking on the Paypal button below). If you read an essay on this blog that you especially enjoyed, please nominate it for inclusion in 
You may have noticed that the images in my left sidebar have recently been depopulated -- awards that my blog has won throughout the years, blogroll icons and even books that I've contributed to .. what is going on? It seems that Flickr is cracking down on miscreants like me who (1) use their site to host graphics, logos and other items -- such as blog awards and book cover art -- and (2) use their site to host photographs that are not theirs, even apparently, if the images appear there with the photographer's permission (goodbye Mystery Birds!). These images have been on my Flickr account for as long as FIVE YEARS without a problem, and now, all of a sudden, Flickr is removing them without warning, and claiming they violate their rules and guidelines. Those rules have obviously been rewritten since I started using Flickr (although I cannot prove it, since I did not save the precise wording five years ago when I established most of my Flickr accounts).
Is there a free image hosting service out there where I can host my mystery birds and other images, logos and whatnot without incurring the wrath of the Flickr overlords after they've rewritten the rules to allow them to denude my blog?
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Comments
You can get 1 gig of photo storage at google - I'm not sure how it would work for linking back here, though.
Posted by: dean | July 2, 2009 6:18 PM
I have my blog's image header stored at photobucket, and so far I haven't had any complaints or disappearances.
Posted by: John | July 2, 2009 7:10 PM
I'll second photobucket, but here's a list of services the DailyKos blog suggests for hosting photos:
* http://www.photobucket.com
* http://www.imageshack.us
* http://flickr.com
* http://smugmug.com
* http://webshots.com
* http://picturetrail.com
* http://mac.com
* http://allyoucanupload.com
they include flickr, but then I don't know when the list was updated last.
Posted by: hibob | July 2, 2009 7:32 PM
Wow - sorry to hear that. :( I guess the Thought Police are taking over the internet. (Or Flickr is reducing costs by throwing out data and selling off some machines.)
Posted by: MadScientist | July 2, 2009 7:48 PM
Sorry, but you are remembering wrong. Flickr has always had a rule that people should only post photos that they have taken. An occasional photo taken by someone else (such as a picture of you as a kid taken by a parent) is fine, they just don't want people having photostreams full of photos downloaded from the web.
Non-photo images used to be forbidden but now they are allowed if you flag them (photo, screenshot, art) properly (look for the "flag your photo" link on the bottom right of the screen).
Posted by: Joe | July 2, 2009 8:19 PM
I too am on photobucket. However, they did censor my pic of the statue of the Venus de Milo, she of the famous missing arms.
Posted by: Phil | July 2, 2009 11:45 PM
Shit! I'd imagine this must feel a bit like arriving home one day to find your landlord has removed and destroyed half of your possessions while you were out. I hate the dictatorial direction the internet seems to be heading these days.
By the way, how do they find out which photos are violating their rule in the first place (unless someone reports them)? They can't possibly have people searching through everybody's albums and investigating the origin of every last photo, can they?
Posted by: Horwood Beer-Master | July 3, 2009 7:54 AM
That really is quite unsettling, as I've been a Flickr subscriber for the past 2 years, and I've been hosting images that weren't taken by me (even though the overwhelming majority of pictures are mine).
Posted by: Hai~Ren | July 3, 2009 8:46 AM
I see three pics of covers of books you've contributed to (Open Laboratory anthologies, '06-08) and three covers of books you're presently reading, but no awards.
Have the Flickrfolk partially retracted their policy changes?
In any case, it would seem exceedingly amateurish and rude of them to alter their rules without a clear and easily found public statement, whether it's happening on their own initiative or due to outside pressure.
Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | July 3, 2009 10:48 AM
photobucket sometimes censors based on:
brown breasts bad
black breasts ok
- some sort of anthropology index of racial distance?
Posted by: Giordano Bruno | July 3, 2009 9:31 PM