I thank both PJ for bringing up the question and Arunas for the link which seems to explain the answer.
Like many here, I have Bookmarked many websites since about 1999, about 2,000 in my case when Google Chrome doesn't eliminate some when I seem to hit a limit, and I noticed in the last year or so that literally thousands of images that I used to look at for reference have now disappeared if they were downloaded from Imageshack.
I didn't know why and now I think I have my answer. It seems the users in many cases did not want to pay for a hosting/storage/cloud service for their images.
While it is quite sad in my opinion, I guess I do understand that using advertising as the income source may not always work for these services. Sad too, in that many Forums, for economic/cost reasons, do not allow direct uploads of photos and insist on the use of third party photo hosting sites that are then linked to the Forum.
For my part, I don't post photos on those sites as I use Dropbox to host my photos and I can load them directly to the various sites/forums with a click of the mouse.
It will be interesting to see how this whole question of how to post photos on websites will develop over the next 10 years or so.
Thank goodness at least for now, autopuzzles allows direct downloading and I hope that can continue.
Bill
