We should include Pixelfed here.
I feel like that's a different use case?
I post things to Imgur so I could reference them in posts on other platforms. I don't want the images tied together.
Pixelfed is an Instagram variant
I feel like using this for the sake of posting pictures to Lemmy would just clog up Pixelfed instances with things not even meant for them. Pixelfed is a community, not really an "image host", even though it technically has that capacity,.
How do pixelfed instances even work. I imagine the storage requirements are crazy on a busy server.
Which may or may not be related to the main server having over a million users and the second biggest server obly having a couple thousand
Upvoted for the Fediverse and FOSS features, but if you're looking for a simple FOSS image hosting service devoid of any social features then also look up for any Lutim instance
Some working instance (there are less and less for service being free and focussed on hosting images makes it a cost hard to sustain for any volunteer individual or association)
Can you embed pixelfed posts here?
EDIT: You certainly can
Catbox claims to keep files forever. I find this claim dubious, what's the catch?
The 'catch' is that running a service like this gets expensive fast and it's the same with all the free image hosting sites.
Catbox is run entirely by donations with anything left covered by the owner out of their own pocket. If the donations dry up, it will eventually have to shut down. Again, this isn't unique to Catbox, all the free sites could easily suffer the same fate.
Do the other sites here delete the files after a given time period?
There are files I've uploaded to them since their service started that are still there.
After a while, files go into a "cold storage" and there's a wait until the server retrieves it.
catbox is more like a file hosting website but yeah, it's pretty good too.
I think imgchest.com deserves more recognition. It has a UI that's a lot like old imgur, doesn't compress the hell out of images and the person that runs it seems pretty cool.
(I've also talked to the person who runs postimages, and they seem pretty cool to fwiw.)
Files from Catbox seem to always be slow to load for me
They are a lot smaller than something like Imgur some they probably don't have worldwide CDN to distribute images, so it will probably depend on the location where you are, but their offering of public API defintely outweights any possible slowdowns for me.
You can just use fediverse (eg. kbin) to upload your image directly, without any of those instances?
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. The individual hosts of the Fediverse are limited on space, and jamming that limited space full of images, rather than using an external image hosting service, is worse for the sustainability of these spaces
In addition, help out your instance admins by resizing the image if you don't need it in high resolution.
Uploading a 250Kb file rather than a 2.5MB one makes a difference when thousands of users are doing it.
@aleph As an instance admin myself, we are looking into fine-tuning those settings to limit uploads of an x amount in file size. But are we are looking into some thumbnail library to reduce the image sizes indeed.
Someone somewhere has to host the image. Realistically it should be the same people hosting the instance so you don't run into cases where historical posts have all their images dropped. In an absolute ideal world everyone selfhosts their own images, but that's an absolute fantasy.
Uploading directly uses server resources which are voluntarily provided, that's why using external providers and just posting links instead is usually better.
You could also use Pixelfed
Doesn't work for animated things.
It's kind of crazy how these popular services are always insistent on killing themselves off with these horrible changes.
Those services are seldom profitable. Especially as they get larger, their costs rise. Meanwhile, imgur, as a service that provides embedded content, has little opportunity to make money off of their users. They rely on infinite growth and ever more people investing money into them to keep financially viable.
But there is no infinite growth and imgur has reached its limits. Now they need to bind users to their platform and rely on ad revenue. So old content gets purged, along with nsfw content, in order to entice advertisers.
Man, I remember when the imagur guy made a post saying hi everyone I made a site we can use for pictures on Reddit. How' long ago was that?
Which one of these alternatives delete the gps/exif data automatically on upload?
NOT postimages certainly ,that lights it up like a christmas tree (except ironically in the the preview I used to try to work out if it did)
Any thoughts about uploading images straight to lemmy.world vs using these sites to host? Is either option vulnerable to takedowns?
Images could eat up the server resources of your instance. Using a third-party service reduces the burden on them.
Anything that you don't host yourself are vulnerable to takedowns. But as someone who has been using postimages.org for many years now, I have never had any such issue with them, and haven't heard of anyone else facing them as well. The other three services I linked also have a good reputation as reliable services.
As an instance admin I gladly host user files.
One thing to take into account is that images posted by an instanceA user on an instanceB community will still be hosted on instance A.
So as long as an instance doesn't host more users than it can handle it should be fine.
Related: What are the best options for gifv and other short videos?
I've been looking for a service that uses IPFS to get a more distributed solution in place. Although you need an HTTP proxy for anyone that doesn't have the plugin or use a browser with support built in. There's a service called Pinata, but it only lets you upload 100 files for free
Do any of these have the ability to link an album? I often put multiple photos together, and post the that link to my communities.
I just created a Catbox account since everyone in this thread has been mentioning it. It allows me to create an album after uploading images to my account and I can add a description. But I can't customize the order the album lists the pictures or place a description on specific pictures.
I just did this
Edit: for some reason it's acting like the link a a lemmy instance? It works if I paste it in my browser.. Edit 2: okay thunder app and connect app consider the /c/a Lemmy page, while Voyager has no issue
Can somebody explain on the purpose of these sites?
The whole time when I was using reddit I would just upload from my gallery to the app, never had to use an image uploader website, it sounds like a pain to use.
That's because you arrived when reddit already had its image hosting.
Before you could only upload a link, so you had to find a hosting site.
It'd be the same if lemmy didn't have one.
And in fact it's like that for me, I didn't configured pict-rs, so I can't upload images to my lemmy instance, I need to configure it or use a hosting site.
Do any of them have an iOS app?
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