I mainly use imgur to upload screenshots using sharex, would appreciate being pointed in the direction of any alternative.
As someone who doesn’t know, what’s wrong with imgur?
Imgur announced recently they are going to be purging images that haven’t been viewed for x amount of time.
Haven’t they always, though? Pretty sure since the beginning it purged anything that hasn’t been viewed for something like 6 months or so. That’s why you got a lot of dead links in old Reddit (or others) posts
I don’t think so, I’ve never had this happen in the few cases where I revisited an imgur url after years of not visiting it
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as long as you aren’t using it for archival purposes. I would prefer not everything I post live forever.
While I’d agree for identifying pictures, image hosting that suddenly doesn’t one day becomes a huge problem for a lot of old tutorial-based content. Look at any old car forum for examples.
I was thinking about this problem recently after I got an email from photobucket that I was over the new limit of photos. I think a more appropriate place to host tutorial content would be on GitHub.
For that kind of thing, I’d say host the images with the rest of the content.
If you’re just shitposting dank memes, having the pictures deleted after a while shouldn’t be a big problem. If you’re posting something a bit more valuable, consider keeping the pictures on flickr or even pixelfed.
Is pixelfed really a good way to prevent dead links? I don’t know much about it other than that it’s part of the fediverse, so I’d assume any pictures hosted there last only as long as the instance they’re posted to.
If you choose to use Pixelfed, you should probably be active in your chosen instance and donate regularly.
I suppose you’re right, though that’s quite involved when all I want is to host an image.
Using flickr or google would be a lighter option. If you put some pictures in a place like that, they are probably going to stay there, but the TOS does leave a very convenient backdoor open. If flickr messes up a database migration, or the datacenter gets hit by a meteor one day, and all of your photos disappear, you can’t hold them accountable. Every option has some issues…
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I had heard about them deleting images uploaded without an account, and the nsfw purge stuff, but I hadn’t heard about this. Thank you so much! I’ll have to make extra sure that everything I’ve uploaded on my account over the years is for sure backed up elsewhere.
Do you know if this is already happening, or is there a date in the future that it’ll start? Most of my uploads are private and I’m too busy to get all of it manually downloaded right this moment (if it’s even still there!) Crud! I only just finally managed to download aaallll my years of stuff from Photobucket after they stopped allowing free hosting, lol.
Thanks for the info, I really appreciate it!
Requires an account to upload these days.
I just tried it and no account required (yet?). Uploading works fine.
They just stopped hosting porn. Dont know why OP is asking but quite a few people were scrambling for a replacement a couple of weeks ago on reddit.
pixelfed might work for you.
Looks interesting and I will def be joining, but it does seem more instagramy than specifically free image hosting.
Yeah, but you can ignore that and hotlink the images, I believe.
Sure, but most (all?) pixelfed instances are run by volunteers. If someone’s using their instance just to hotlink images elsewhere, an admin might decide it’s not worth it.
Of course, that’s true for just using a pixelfed instance for its documented purpose, but at least then you’re probably privy to what’s being discussed on the instance in terms of server costs, etc.
First thing I thought of as well. I like that they allow image expiration and not just forever.
You can upload an image when creating a post by clicking on the small thumbnail icon at the bottom right of the file input
you can also copy and image and paste it straight into the text box, it will upload and embed the image:
This is straight from greenshot.
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based?
yeah, cool… whoosh (for me!)
Some instances/servers are currently not capable of uploads larger than ~100kb, so a good image CDN is desired.
I also feel like lots of people uploading images directly to an instance’s servers put a lot more strain on them - especially at a time where most servers are experiencing serious growing pains and may not really have the funds to keep expanding their storage. They’re not ad supported like places like Reddit are.
I think it would be courteous of us to try and spread it out a bit and use services specifically intended for and set up for image hosting.
If you are willing to selfhost: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#file-transfer---single-click--drag-n-drop-upload
IPFS
Catbox is a robust looking option that I’ve experimented with. I’m a bit concerned that they’re blocked in a few countries, though.
Blocked countries, sourced from above FAQ
- Australia: DNS block. “Decided that Catbox was a terrorist propaganda spreading website.” Explicitly defining DNS serves to a public server is required to access site and files.
- Ireland/UK: IP block. “Clips of [football] games being uploaded to Catbox.” VPN required to access site and files.
- Iran: IP block. “Uknown, but I’m sure you can probably make some pretty accurate guesses.” VPN required.
- Afghanistan: Ditto above.
–
I’m not sure if that would be a massive issue for most Beehaw users, but personally I’m not a fan of having content potentially inaccessible or at least requiring additional tools to access.
Otherwise I couldn’t recommend Catbox enough, which is what really bums me out. Massive uncompressed file sizes, indefinite file retention, wide file support, direct file linking, the place has the works. If Catbox wasn’t already blocked to a mild degree in the mentioned countries, I would be all in on recommending them.
Related: If anyone is in one of the listed countries above, I’d appreciate it if you tried to access the site and some direct file links and reporting back if a VPN or public DNS is indeed required. There’s the catbox test Millions has below and I have a file of my own for good measure.
Been considering to self-host, Imgur clearly no longer wants to be in the image hosting business and wants to focus on their “community” instead
do they have a sizable community? honestly i just assumed it was almost exclusively used for image hosting.
It’s home to a very strange community that was unaware that their “platform” was just an image host for users of an actual social media platform. Well, at least it was before imgur recently started adding social media features and purged nsfw content.
Popular image posts from reddit would routinely get boosted (sans context) to the top of imgur’s homepage, attracting confused, angry, and often unintentionally hilarious comments from imgur users. Iirc there was a subreddit dedicated to this phenomenon.
https://vgy.me/ has been pretty reliable for me
They delete your photos if they’re unaccessed by the uploader after a year unfortunately. Ask me how I found out :(
Oh
I found this because I was testing out nostr and suddenly had loli.net in the firewall logs (apparently a content delivery network): https://sm.ms/
I like it because it gives you markdown you can paste into lemmy :D
If you want something very cheap (though not necessarily totally free), and within your control, just get an AWS S3 bucket and put them there. Or possibly Backblaze.
Yep, I’m gradually shifting to S3 for my public direct file sharing as a bit of an exercise in learning AWS. It’s not free, but 99.99% of the time it’s remarkably cheap. If you’re willing to put up with learning AWS (or any other general-purpose platform really, cloud or self-hosted,) there’s a nice feeling that comes with having more leniency to do things your way and on your terms.
Now whether it works properly, however, let alone work at all, is an entirely different story. But that’s the double-edged sword with going out on your own: it’s more likely to be your fault, not someone else’s.
id be pretty psyched if my video embedding starts working one of these days 👨💻
I’m not sure about the longevity but a lot of people use discord as CDN apparently. There’s even an API for that.
We should really try to stick to federated FOSS choices, so that we don’t have a future nightmare on our hands.
What’s there to federate about image cdn? If you don’t want to use 3rd party service just self host. You just have to make compromises either way.
We actually feature a federated image hosting service on lemmy, there isn’t much to image hosting to federate, you’re right, but we shouldn’t rely on imgur or discord or anything centralized wherever possible to avoid centralization of control over our media.
What’s really the difference between a federated Lemmy instance for hosting vs a 3rd party anyways?
If another Lemmy instance goes down, all the content on it is gone anyways. Federated != Mirrored. Just because you can browse the content doesn’t mean it’s safe from going away at the whims of one person
That’s very true, but i’m opposed to giving discord and imgur even more power over the media posted to it.
Again, image hosting is a very minimally federated thing, and it’s one of the areas where it makes the least difference, but regardless, we should strive to avoid centralization wherever possible.
Also, I think it’s possible to create a federated automatically mirrored alternative, I wonder if there’s potential there, I don’t know!
I have been using lensdump
I use vgy.me, it doesn’t support video uploads but it does have markdown in the image page
edit: switched to catbox because i learned that vgy autoremoves after a year
