Ah, thanks! I hadn't noticed that popup had a title.
Since, as reported earlier in this discussion, imgur is a hassle (or worse) to use, I agree with the Zooniverse's choice to remove it from the info in that popup. I think the current text is as good as can be expected ("you need to find a suitable image hosting service."). If a volunteer or project team discovers a site that works well and is easy to use, the Zooniverse might consider adding that site to the popup. However, it seems there is no obvious alternative for hosting images people want to post on talk.
I got a newsletter yesterday for a new project, Cameras for Conservation. The project shows with a check mark and has lots of unretired subjects and is getting lots of classifications. But it is not on the Active (or other) tab of the Zooniverse Projects menu. Why not?
I expect this is something the project team omitted to do or did wrong. If I knew what they had to do to fix this, I would have posted instructions on the project's talk page.
The trouble now is about having links to "images" which disappear on the imgur home page. We only have "posts" . I can't have a link like previous "i.imgur" which was used to upload images in zooniverse posts.
The only solution I found was to post the link to imgur post. That's not very convenient for browsing.
Looking forward having a better procedure or recommendation ; Thanks
Thanks @ZngabitanT ! This would have been handy to know when I created the Fossilfinder field guide - Back in those days I laboriously created thumbnails in some photo editor and then uploaded them as media for use as visual link descriptors. I didn't even figure out how to resize images until much later. I wonder what other tricks I don't know
Moreover, you can leverage Zooniverse's thumbnails-on-demand facility to create modest-size previews of large image files on the server side, which helps users on slow connections by giving them quicker page displays, rather than having the browser pull the large image file and resize it at the client end.
E.g. for embedding a subject image scaled down to 300 pixels wide, I would use something like:
having the thumbnail be a link to the subject's Talk page, resulting in:
The same idiom works for images uploaded as project media - again I just insert e.g. thumbnails.zooniverse.org/600x/ at the right place in the URL, with the full-size image as the link target:
[](+tab+https://panoptes-uploads.zooniverse.org/project_attached_image/9acdf463-887d-472f-800e-8857cb8c8b1f.png)
The smaller version can then be accessed more quickly, while the full-size version will be loaded only when the user clicks on the thumbnail to request it:
(There's a lot of useful Magic in the Zooniverse...)
Actually as a logged in volunteer you can link to any zooniverse media that is Public any you can find the url for it.
Example 1) You can link to a full subject including multiframe subjects or video using a bit of text like this in your comment:
You can obtain the url by navigating to the subject right click on it and use “Copy video link” or the Mac equivalent. This gives:
.
.
.
Example 2) You can link to a single image – such as a single frame of a multiframe video by navigating to where the image is displayed on zooniverse and using “Copy image link:
Which gives:
.
.
.
Example 3) You can resize images:
Which gives:
.
.
.
Example 4) You can use a thumbnail as a link to the full sized image that opens in another tab:
[](+tab+https://panoptes-uploads.zooniverse.org/subject_location/dffbc5a3-9e39-43e4-9e82-8e6269760d00.jpeg)
Click on image to open full size in a new tab:
.
.
.
Example 5) You can even use tables to space more than one image across the page:
| | |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| [](+tab+https://panoptes-uploads.zooniverse.org/subject_location/dffbc5a3-9e39-43e4-9e82-8e6269760d00.jpeg) | [](+tab+https://panoptes-uploads.zooniverse.org/subject_location/9cd560e8-63be-413c-acbc-92d3474fe6ff.jpeg) |
Which gives two thumbnails both links to full size images in new tabs:
I don't think that the built in Zooniverse image hosting is open for any volunteer to use.
Yes it is. Anyone with a Zooniverse User ID can create a project. It doesn't have to get further than being created: it can be an incomplete test project without workflows or subjects or anything more than a project name. Once the project exists, they can upload images to the project either as subjects or as "media". (The Media section of a project typically includes the image shown on the project's home page, images shown in the field help, tutorial, About pages, and more. Once an image is uploaded, they can link to it from anywhere, including here on the "central" talk page and on talk or About pages in other projects.
@Pmason sorry, I'm not sure I understand you correctly.
I don't think that the built in Zooniverse image hosting is open for any volunteer to use.
I'm not a project owner, just a volunteer, and we need to be able to post images to comments in subjects and in discussions. It's not the project owner that needs to upload any images to a subject.
Actually all I asked for was Zooniverse to help us get the links on Imgur back where we'd use them, but obviously with the new Imgur rules in place, they want to prevent such hosting. Thus, I think it's best just to forget about this entire story. We'll find other hosting services in case Imgur won't do the job any more.
Yes, Zooniverse's built-in image hosting works very nicely. I've been using it for almost a year through a private project, after prior correspondence with the Zooniverse team to be sure there weren't any fundamental objections, and the functionality leaves nothing to be desired. (Here's one example, with a mix of partly animated homegrown content, inlined scaled-down subject images linking to their corresponding subject pages, and inlined-with-links external material courtesy Caltech/MIT/LIGO Laboratory per their image use policy.)
For the use case that has given rise to this thread, I would wholeheartedly recommend this approach.
It can be abused, and it has occasionally been abused. Commercial spam outfits and their ilk are capable of creating Zooniverse accounts and private projects, too. Dealing with abuse, quickly and robustly, will remain a serious concern, and a burden on the staff and on anyone happening to spot something. Legal obligations aside, the quicker inappropriate material is removed from sight, the less attractive Zooniverse is going to be for spammers and other abusers.
Also while your subject images are "property of the project owner" you have, by using them as subjects in a public domain kind of "put them out there" into the public with precious little protection in terms of copywrite or water marks.
I am not a lawyer, but Zooniverse's terms of service do not at all imply public domain status for material posted as subjects or otherwise on Zooniverse - far from it. (Images posted anywhere on the web with unauthenticated visibility can be downloaded/copied/whatever, in the sense that there's no technical barrier to prevent it, but images posted on Zooniverse cannot legally be used elsewhere unless the copyright owner has explicitly licensed such use.)
My point is that someone with owner or collaborator status can upload images to their Media section in the project builder and link those images to a comment, just as other media images would be linked to sat the tutorial.
Indeed, anyone with a project has a builtin image hosting service for zooniverse related purposes.
Also you, or any logged in user, can link to any existing subject in the comments. Ergo you as a project owner can upload any images to a special subject set and link to these just as any other subject in your comments.
Also while your subject images are "property of the project owner" you have, by using them as subjects in a public domain kind of "put them out there" into the public with precious little protection in terms of copywrite or water marks. There is no practical barriers for anyone to copy subject images and use them however they like, except for common courtesy and some morals - things that appear in short supply these days.
Please note that Imgur's Terms Of Service (linked from their Community Rules page) under Stuff not to do explicitly state:
Also, don't use Imgur to host image libraries you link to from elsewhere, content for your website, advertising, avatars, or anything else that turns us into your content delivery network.
I'm not sure for how long exactly this clause has been there, but it's been there for more than a year.
Thus using Imgur to host images for use on Zooniverse violates Imgur's current terms of service. And they do enforce them, although not yet 100% consistently; I've already seen a large amount of link rot due to their image deletions.
Thank you for your elaborate answer.
Yes, as Jim pointed out, the recommendation is in the markdown help hidden behind the ? in every comment. When we started to use the new platform in 2019 this was also discussed among our team and I made a guide on how to post images with Imgur (see paragraph 2 of this post). This is part of the trouble because after every Imgur design update, I have to adjust that post.
And thank you Jim for opening a ticket on GitHub for the issue with Imgur. Let me carve out our problem to show you where we hope Zooniverse could help us to convince Imgur to provide the two links we need for our purpose:
To obtain a direct link for an image on the Imgur upload page to use in a Zooniverse comment and
to provide the link to "Images" of the logged in user also in the menu on the upload page.
Until Feb 2024 we could just copy the direct link after the upload of an image. After this date we had to change to our Images to obtain the Direct link, but at least the link to the Images was on the upload page
Since April 2025 we have to change to the Imgur homepage to find the link to our Images and then we are able to find the direct links. Here's a graphic that may explain what I mean:
Please note: If your policy or anything else speaks against your contacting the Imgur support, that's fine and we will just continue as best as we can now.
Re the discussion sparked by this:
I think Github and Google Drive are not good options for our volunteers to use for the mentioned reasons.
Please understand that we do not upload images at random in our project. We use it mainly to upload collages for our animal matching projects, which are an integral part of the C&S project. These collages are created from our own subjects (the videos used in classifying). Here's an example. There may also be uploaded personal images but those are for community building reasons.
And for @Pmason 's question: All uploaded subjects on C&S are property of the project owner, Max Plank Institute. No other photos are uploaded as subjects, ever.
Even assuming the images could only be shown on Zooniverse pages (to prevent it becoming a general-use image hosting site - word would get around), wouldn't allowing the entire Zooniverse community (I know, even now anyone can create a project and use it to upload media) to easily post images be a cost burden for storing and serving the images? And staff to do the required compliance monitoring.
Page of 351
Talk is a place for Zooniverse volunteers and researchers to discuss their projects, collect and share data, and work together to make new discoveries.
May 14th 2025, 10:28 pm
It is fixed, thanks.
May 14th 2025, 8:22 pm
This should be fixed now, thanks for bringing it to our attention!
May 14th 2025, 2:45 pm
Ah, thanks! I hadn't noticed that popup had a title.
Since, as reported earlier in this discussion, imgur is a hassle (or worse) to use, I agree with the Zooniverse's choice to remove it from the info in that popup. I think the current text is as good as can be expected ("you need to find a suitable image hosting service."). If a volunteer or project team discovers a site that works well and is easy to use, the Zooniverse might consider adding that site to the popup. However, it seems there is no obvious alternative for hosting images people want to post on talk.
May 14th 2025, 2:37 pm
It's what pops up when you click the "
?" button near the top right corner of the comment entry field.May 14th 2025, 1:57 pm
@c_cld, where is this "Guide to commenting in Talk" you mention?
May 14th 2025, 1:52 pm
I got a newsletter yesterday for a new project, Cameras for Conservation. The project shows with a check mark and has lots of unretired subjects and is getting lots of classifications. But it is not on the Active (or other) tab of the Zooniverse Projects menu. Why not?
I expect this is something the project team omitted to do or did wrong. If I knew what they had to do to fix this, I would have posted instructions on the project's talk page.
May 14th 2025, 12:34 pm
Hi,
@ Shaun A. Noordin(darkeshard)
imgur is no more cited in "Guide to commenting in Talk"
The trouble now is about having links to "images" which disappear on the imgur home page. We only have "posts" . I can't have a link like previous "i.imgur" which was used to upload images in zooniverse posts.
The only solution I found was to post the link to imgur post. That's not very convenient for browsing.
Looking forward having a better procedure or recommendation ; Thanks
May 12th 2025, 11:01 am
This comment has been deleted
May 6th 2025, 7:43 pm
Thanks @ZngabitanT ! This would have been handy to know when I created the Fossilfinder field guide - Back in those days I laboriously created thumbnails in some photo editor and then uploaded them as media for use as visual link descriptors. I didn't even figure out how to resize images until much later. I wonder what other tricks I don't know
May 6th 2025, 6:43 pm
Moreover, you can leverage Zooniverse's thumbnails-on-demand facility to create modest-size previews of large image files on the server side, which helps users on slow connections by giving them quicker page displays, rather than having the browser pull the large image file and resize it at the client end.
E.g. for embedding a subject image scaled down to 300 pixels wide, I would use something like:
[](+tab+/projects/zooniverse/gravity-spy/talk/subjects/107412725)having the thumbnail be a link to the subject's Talk page, resulting in:
The same idiom works for images uploaded as project media - again I just insert e.g.
thumbnails.zooniverse.org/600x/at the right place in the URL, with the full-size image as the link target:[](+tab+https://panoptes-uploads.zooniverse.org/project_attached_image/9acdf463-887d-472f-800e-8857cb8c8b1f.png)The smaller version can then be accessed more quickly, while the full-size version will be loaded only when the user clicks on the thumbnail to request it:
(There's a lot of useful Magic in the Zooniverse...)
May 6th 2025, 5:26 pm
Actually as a logged in volunteer you can link to any zooniverse media that is Public any you can find the url for it.
Example 1) You can link to a full subject including multiframe subjects or video using a bit of text like this in your comment:
You can obtain the url by navigating to the subject right click on it and use “Copy video link” or the Mac equivalent. This gives:
.
.
.
Example 2) You can link to a single image – such as a single frame of a multiframe video by navigating to where the image is displayed on zooniverse and using “Copy image link:
Which gives:
.
.
.
Example 3) You can resize images:
Which gives:
.
.
.
Example 4) You can use a thumbnail as a link to the full sized image that opens in another tab:
Click on image to open full size in a new tab:
.
.
.
Example 5) You can even use tables to space more than one image across the page:
Which gives two thumbnails both links to full size images in new tabs:
May 6th 2025, 4:09 pm
Thank you, good to know! This might be a solution if other image hosting services fail.
May 6th 2025, 3:57 pm
Yes it is. Anyone with a Zooniverse User ID can create a project. It doesn't have to get further than being created: it can be an incomplete test project without workflows or subjects or anything more than a project name. Once the project exists, they can upload images to the project either as subjects or as "media". (The Media section of a project typically includes the image shown on the project's home page, images shown in the field help, tutorial, About pages, and more. Once an image is uploaded, they can link to it from anywhere, including here on the "central" talk page and on talk or About pages in other projects.
May 6th 2025, 9:30 am
@Pmason sorry, I'm not sure I understand you correctly.
I don't think that the built in Zooniverse image hosting is open for any volunteer to use.
I'm not a project owner, just a volunteer, and we need to be able to post images to comments in subjects and in discussions. It's not the project owner that needs to upload any images to a subject.
Actually all I asked for was Zooniverse to help us get the links on Imgur back where we'd use them, but obviously with the new Imgur rules in place, they want to prevent such hosting. Thus, I think it's best just to forget about this entire story. We'll find other hosting services in case Imgur won't do the job any more.
Thanks all!
May 6th 2025, 8:33 am
Yes, Zooniverse's built-in image hosting works very nicely.
I've been using it for almost a year through a private project, after prior correspondence with the Zooniverse team to be sure there weren't any fundamental objections, and the functionality leaves nothing to be desired. (Here's one example, with a mix of partly animated homegrown content, inlined scaled-down subject images linking to their corresponding subject pages, and inlined-with-links external material courtesy Caltech/MIT/LIGO Laboratory per their image use policy.)
For the use case that has given rise to this thread, I would wholeheartedly recommend this approach.
It can be abused, and it has occasionally been abused. Commercial spam outfits and their ilk are capable of creating Zooniverse accounts and private projects, too. Dealing with abuse, quickly and robustly, will remain a serious concern, and a burden on the staff and on anyone happening to spot something. Legal obligations aside, the quicker inappropriate material is removed from sight, the less attractive Zooniverse is going to be for spammers and other abusers.
I am not a lawyer, but Zooniverse's terms of service do not at all imply public domain status for material posted as subjects or otherwise on Zooniverse - far from it. (Images posted anywhere on the web with unauthenticated visibility can be downloaded/copied/whatever, in the sense that there's no technical barrier to prevent it, but images posted on Zooniverse cannot legally be used elsewhere unless the copyright owner has explicitly licensed such use.)
May 5th 2025, 6:16 pm
My point is that someone with owner or collaborator status can upload images to their Media section in the project builder and link those images to a comment, just as other media images would be linked to sat the tutorial.
Indeed, anyone with a project has a builtin image hosting service for zooniverse related purposes.
Also you, or any logged in user, can link to any existing subject in the comments. Ergo you as a project owner can upload any images to a special subject set and link to these just as any other subject in your comments.
Also while your subject images are "property of the project owner" you have, by using them as subjects in a public domain kind of "put them out there" into the public with precious little protection in terms of copywrite or water marks. There is no practical barriers for anyone to copy subject images and use them however they like, except for common courtesy and some morals - things that appear in short supply these days.
May 5th 2025, 6:15 pm
Thanks @ZngabitanT I’ve added that to the issue.
https://github.com/zooniverse/markdownz/issues/282#issuecomment-2851915424
May 5th 2025, 4:00 pm
Please note that Imgur's Terms Of Service (linked from their Community Rules page) under Stuff not to do explicitly state:
I'm not sure for how long exactly this clause has been there, but it's been there for more than a year.
Thus using Imgur to host images for use on Zooniverse violates Imgur's current terms of service. And they do enforce them, although not yet 100% consistently; I've already seen a large amount of link rot due to their image deletions.
May 5th 2025, 3:08 pm
Hi Shaun and Jim
Thank you for your elaborate answer.
Yes, as Jim pointed out, the recommendation is in the markdown help hidden behind the ? in every comment. When we started to use the new platform in 2019 this was also discussed among our team and I made a guide on how to post images with Imgur (see paragraph 2 of this post). This is part of the trouble because after every Imgur design update, I have to adjust that post.
And thank you Jim for opening a ticket on GitHub for the issue with Imgur. Let me carve out our problem to show you where we hope Zooniverse could help us to convince Imgur to provide the two links we need for our purpose:
To obtain a direct link for an image on the Imgur upload page to use in a Zooniverse comment and
to provide the link to "Images" of the logged in user also in the menu on the upload page.
Until Feb 2024 we could just copy the direct link after the upload of an image. After this date we had to change to our Images to obtain the Direct link, but at least the link to the Images was on the upload page
Since April 2025 we have to change to the Imgur homepage to find the link to our Images and then we are able to find the direct links. Here's a graphic that may explain what I mean:
Please note: If your policy or anything else speaks against your contacting the Imgur support, that's fine and we will just continue as best as we can now.
Re the discussion sparked by this:
I think Github and Google Drive are not good options for our volunteers to use for the mentioned reasons.
Please understand that we do not upload images at random in our project. We use it mainly to upload collages for our animal matching projects, which are an integral part of the C&S project. These collages are created from our own subjects (the videos used in classifying). Here's an example. There may also be uploaded personal images but those are for community building reasons.
And for @Pmason 's question: All uploaded subjects on C&S are property of the project owner, Max Plank Institute. No other photos are uploaded as subjects, ever.
Thanks, Heidi
@darkeshard @eatyourgreens
May 3rd 2025, 3:44 pm
Even assuming the images could only be shown on Zooniverse pages (to prevent it becoming a general-use image hosting site - word would get around), wouldn't allowing the entire Zooniverse community (I know, even now anyone can create a project and use it to upload media) to easily post images be a cost burden for storing and serving the images? And staff to do the required compliance monitoring.