Question Image link not working

We are currently running Kunena 5.1.18 on our website.

We don't allow image uploads (as attachments) on our forum because we don't have the space for them.

I have users who want to link an image on Google Drive, Flickr or Dropbox but the Image Link button doesn't seem to work - though it used to.

I have tried to link a picture from my own Google Drive with a shareable link (making sure it was publicly viewable) and all it does is wrap it in [img]...[/img] tags. Preview just shows the value of the link, and if I submit the post the result is the same - not even a clickable link.

Is this a Google Drive thing?

Are there any instructions anywhere for linking to images on external storage?

Thank you

Have you chosen in the configuration (tab BBCode) the option "Display Images With Non-standard File Extensions = Images" ?

Thank you for the suggestion. I changed it from 'Text' to 'Image' and instead of the previous result got a link named 'File attachment' which, when the link was clicked on, couldn't be loaded.

It may be a red herring, but if the link starts with https:// there seems to be a problem. It all works as expected if the link starts with http:// . I used a site that I wrote from scratch and uploaded a single image to both the http area and the https area - only the former worked in a test post.

Our forum is on a site that forces https across all pages, so I'm wondering if that causes a conflict.

This problem has nothing to do with Kunena as well as with https addresses. I've visited Flickr and it seems they have their own rules (I don't know it). If you click on a photo on this page you see on the bottom right symbols. With the last symbol you get the right image address.

Thank you for your reply.

This is what has me so puzzled - Google Drive provides a special shareable link which is what I used in my Kunena testing but it didn't work in a Kunena post.

The same 'special link' method is used in Photobucket but a lot of our members stopped using that when they started charging to share images.

Looks like I'll have to create a Flickr account and a Dropbox account and activate our Instagram account to test those as well to see if I can get any of them to work.

Onwards and upwards

Update...

I've managed to embed a Dropbox image.

You have to get the shareable link from Dropbox then edit it so that ?dl=0 reads ?raw=1 instead.

I found this after a lot of hunting on the web so thanks to the author of the original article and I hope it's of use to others.