Uploading to the forums directly is the best way period. The forum will never lose a photo due to a 3rd party site holding your pics ransom. Here's the real rub. You spend all this time and effort to document your project/skill/instructions/problem/whatever for all to see and benefit from, and then have the most important part dissapear... It sucks. Please upload to any forum that allows it. It's just so much better. You preserve this valuable content and info when you do that.
The problem is that most forums will stop allowing it because they cannot afford to have enough drive space to save these files. They will then start to charge for access to the site to post and participation will go down dramatically. The real problem is everyone is used to having free space on things like Google, not realizing it is all done as a way to datamine.
If each person would spend a little money to store their photos, we will keep free access to a lot of the sites run by people as a service to help us. Most of these site owners are not making money from these sites.