I too was very frustrated with this when I first joined in Feb 2021! I made a video and PDF addressing this issue because I witnessed many new members asking "How the hell do I upload a picture?". A link to that post is
https://forums.prsguitars.com/threads/sharing-pictures-on-prs-forum.47818/
There are a few other links in that post addressing this issue as well from other angles and times.
I can not imagine it would be all that difficult to cross this bridge (considering I wrote from scratch, code to run forums of this complexity 20 years ago) and I am happy to volunteer as a moderator to help screen postings. And if pix were forced to have to wait for approval, I think that would be a fair price to pay.
As for naysayers based on the myriad of arguments surrounding this issue, I would note the following outlines:
1. From what I have seen here (and maybe this is due to how difficult it is to post images here), there are not thousands of pictures going up here each day. So any arguments of storage space costs are, from what I see here activity wise, moot points. At ~$20/TB for storage these days, I can't see this being an issue. My guestimate would be 100 - 200 pix per day. That could of course increase dramatically, if you make photo uploads more user intuitive. If that were to happen, there are many ways adjustments could be made to continue to offer this service.
2. From a legal standpoint, you moderate the input for anything with included pictures. As mentioned above, I am happy to help moderate voluntarily as a service to the community of this forum. I'd rather do that than see 1 in 3 sign ups have to ask "how do I do this?". One would need to look at actual activity levels to figure out if this is in fact feasible, but as mentioned above, I would find it hard to believe that it is not manageable either internally or with some enthusiastic volunteers (raise your hand if you are in to helping if this became an option).
3. Some have argued in discussions surrounding this topic, that this is not Instagram or Facebook. I don't believe anybody is asking that it should be. We are after all, wanting to upload real life examples of the products this company sells, not videos of cats on robotic vacuum cleaners or babies first step. What other companies have such an advantage? Where their customers can't wait to share their new acquisition with the rest of us, and we all drool! We are fanatics about these instruments, and they should be using the images posted here, as part of their advertising campaigns. Using these materials to show what their customers think about their products, which is always thumbs up, and examples where the product is being used, with delight is nothing but a win win. And anyone who uploaded photos would let them use their pix in ad campaigns because they would agree to it when they click the consent box that defines the rules and regulations regarding photo uploads (which nobody will read). "By uploading a photo to this site, you agree to allow PRS Guitars the right to use these uploaded images for historical, internal and/or marketing purposes without any compensation whatsoever." Yada yada yada. I know if I was involved in a company that had a fanatic following that wanted to share their real use experiences of my product, I would be using that as a marketing tool. They should be proud of it and flaunt it IMO.
There are other issues, and these are broad outlines of how to handle the ones mentioned here, but I do believe this can be done without an unreasonable amount of effort or cost.
So to sum it up, not a fan of the $20, because I honestly do not think it is justified. I am however all on the side of implementing this feature one way or another, and if that did involve a yearly fee, I may abide. I did after all, go to the trouble of establishing a SSL certificate for one of my websites so I would not have to use these image hosting services. I did so because when I first tried to post stuff from my site, it showed up for some but not others due to the "mixed content" issue (http images displayed on https site). My SSL Certificate resolved that issue.
Power To The PRS PIX!
Cheers~
MW
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