: I can see the logic of not hosting pics locally. This forum is
: quite active and old pictures would start taking up serious
: server space for no reason.

Right. Everybody knows that anything about kayak building more than a couple of years old is hopelessly outdated.
It also trains newcomers to not bother with searches on past threads, since there is a very good chance that the picture links there will be 'dead', though the (usually somewhat confusing without pics) text will be archived.

Anyway, the present system seems to work OK, so perhaps no impetus for change.