Imgur now blocks several VPNs and have issues loading embedded previews in several fediverse platforms. So instead of using imgur, you could use one of the following alternatives for uploading your images.
https://postimages.org/
https://imgbox.com/
https://imgbb.com/
https://www.imagebam.com/
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
Pixelfed.social gives you 7GB of total storage
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
Pixelfed is a really good option. I have only added the websites that I have used, but have been planning on make a Pixelfed account.
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.
It’s for image too
yeah, i mostly use it for images and pdfs. it has been great when you need to send your friends some low size file at the eleventh hour.
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.
They look good. Large size limit of 200 mb and NSFW-friendly. But unfortunately, according to their FAQ, they are blocked in Australia, UK, Ireland, Iran and Afghanistan (the latter two are not surprising though).
Weird, I am in the uk and can use catbox no problem
Same here in Australia. Might only be a select few smaller ISPs that have blocked it, ie the ones the government can bully easily.
It’s seems like it’s only a dns level block, so changing to non-isp dns might help you bypass that restriction.
Also in Aus here, using ISP DNS, not blocked. I think what you generally find is that most ISP’s just don’t do the DNS blocks, even if they’re required to. Like you said, it’s very easily circumvented and also it just doesn’t lead to any measurable outcome other than the ISP customer’s dissatisfaction in some cases. It’s probably more profitable to retain the customers and deal with whatever regulatory blowback.
Not blocked in the UK here for me. Sounds like an ISP specific thing.
they are blocked in Australia, UK, Ireland, Iran and Afghanistan
Seems to be blocked for a friend from the philippines too iirc. Combined with other replies saying they can access it from some of these, I assume that list is outdated.
Website works for me here in the Philippines.
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.
Saving images as webp gives massive savings, and I think everyone can view them nowadays.
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.
Shouldn’t this be a per instance policy? Why would the onus be on the poster?
Because pretty much all instances are being run by volunteers and hobbyists, and not a for-profit who is profiting from your content. This is just something nice to do for reducing the resources they require to run the service.
I understand that. You and I are decent human beings, but a lot of people are dicks. So the instance owners should be the ones active at protecting their resources.
Uploading directly uses server resources which are voluntarily provided, that’s why using external providers and just posting links instead is usually better.
It’s true, but there’s some pretty reasonably priced S3 compatible containers now. To the extent I’d only start getting concerned at the 1TB mark.
Of course I also am not going to complain if people use hosting sites and prolong how long it takes to get to 1tb :p
You could also use Pixelfed
Correct! Shout out to @dansup, who created Pixelfed. Which is a wonderful piece of software.
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.
At least they aren’t putting ads into the images they serve… Yet.
yeah it does seem like websites are more affordable on smaller scale
The issue with that though is that they end up removing what made them popular to begin with, so then they lose their popularity and traffic and then they are worth nothing again lol
deleted by creator
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?
They came in at just the right time Waffleimages folded.
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)
For when someone answers this, @remindme@mstdn.social in 5 hours
Fyi, that bot won’t respond unless you mention its name at the start of your message.
It did actually, or only I can see its response?
Weird, I don’t see any response.
I will have to test this manually across sites to know because none of them advertises themselves as doing this. But nevertheless, the best practice would be to strip down such data yourselves before uploading. There are many apps that will allow you to easily do that.
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.
From what I understand reading this thread, if instanceA goes down, any images hosted there are lost, while the comments will still exist because they’re federated. You’re only shifting the responsibility of hosting the image from a site like imgur to the home instance of the poster.
I guess it comes down to if you’re concerned about how long your home instance is going to be around for, use an external host, or see if/when account migrations are added if images move too (although they would also have to fix the src for wherever the image is now being hosted)
A downside to hosting images externally is that these image hosts can go down before the Lemmy instance does, leaving many posts without context. One should keep this in mind when choosing where to upload their images.
Lemmy instances have quite small size limits compared to other services. And all of them are vulnerable to DMCA takedowns as they have to comply with the laws of the host country, but unless you plan on hosting CSAM you are good with either choice.
But all have a good track record for keeping images online without deleting.
Aren’t other file/image hosts just as vulnerable to DMCA takedowns? I mean, they have to comply with their host country’s law, too.
In theory, yes. In practice, no. E.g. Russia is known to ignore DMCA takedown requests and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
One downside is that images uploaded to lemmy.world are hosted on lemmy.world. If the instance ever goes down those images are gone since federation does not propagate the files. This is less of an issue for that specific instance, but I could see smaller instances disappearing and causing issues with broken image links.
Lemme see if this works
It does!
Ooo it even does in jerboa, kind of, but it’s static, just takes a second to load.
Lemmy try this one
I’m just talking to myself here
Last one I promise
You need to use the direct links to the file ending with the file extension (.webp or .gif). Otherwise, you are asking it to embed a whole webpage, which is not possible. You can find the direct link by right clicking on the image and pressing copy image link.
Here are the proper embeds, if these don’t work, then jerboa doesn’t support embedding animated images.
Thanks, it’s been a very long day
Working great on kbin! Jerboa might not properly support animated gifs yet.
I could’ve sworn I saw some somewhere, but I have a memory like a rusty sieve these days
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
IPFS (or similar tech) is the only sustainable solution for media hosting on federated platforms.
Permanence is important - old posts with dead media links is bad for society IMO - but we can’t expect volunteer instance admins to be held responsible for something as complex and expensive as permanent media hosting.
While somewhat correct it still needs someone hosting your data, even if it’s you.
Slightly off-topic:
I never get why Ipfs is using these false claims about “uploading” to the Ipfs and having it “permanently” stored. In reality it’s just Torrent, someone has to have the file - if no one has, there is no file. In theory one could make the same file available again in the future but all the hashing settings have to match with the previous or you’ll get a different reference hash.
The hardest part will always be moderation. It will be incredibly difficult to prevent smut and CSAM propagating without people actively monitoring what content is being hosted. But even if you assume random people have the time and are ok with seeing and reporting/filtering out that content, you’ll still never combat advanced cryptographic steganography techniques; a picture of a flower might have content hidden inside it somehow that encodes the bad content in a way that you’ll never find it. On top of that, moderation is work that no one wants to do for random content they don’t care about, but without people hosting content they don’t care about, links will die too quickly to be useful. Imagine if you posted an image to a niche community, and then had to keep your system on for hours, days, or weeks, ready to seed it to the one lurker who happens across it, and then maybe they also seed it.
tl;dr it’s a very difficult problem…but honestly maybe AI breakthroughs can help with it
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
okay thunder app and connect app consider the /c/a Lemmy page
Oops. I always wonder how to recognise federated services as domain names do not say much. How does Voyager avoid that issue?
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using an URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !rk6abk@catbox.moe
Postimages support that. They will give a gallery link if you upload multiple files together. If you have a free account, then you can add or remove images from the galleries later as well.
Here is a gallery I made just now https://postimg.cc/gallery/pzt46sv
has anyone got hosting sites for uploading videos/GIFs?
imgchest.com supports gifs and videos.
That’s a good suggestion. Especially since they support videos as well.
embed test
(it works on Lemmy,
not kbin tho)I can see it embedded on kbin if that’s what you mean.
oh right I tried viewing it on there and could still only see the alt text.
maybe I didn’t wait long enough for it to load
Click on the image icon on the side of the alt text and you will see the image. If you want, you can set images in posts to autoload from settings.
It works on kbin. I am on kbin.social.
weird I tried viewing it on there and it just showed the alt text
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.Wow image-hosting is a thing. Why don’t they just have something so essential out of the box, is it expensive or something
It requires a lot of storage space. Much more than for just text.
Also, additional liability for hosting images uploaded by literally anyone, that could depict abuse, or be copyrighted.
Ahh so if somebody did that, the blame would fall on the site that has the image posted
Short answer is yes. Long answer is that with text it’s much easier to stamp out illegal activity because keyword searches are cheap while semantic searches in images are pretty good but extremely computationally expensive. You can’t just scan for illegal activity in images the same way you can nigh instantly scan a body of text for “illegal-site.com”.
That makes a certain kind of sense but does that mean the filtering algorithm Facebook uses that targets NSFW photos in posts and group chats is very complicated and expensive? is it important for a site like reddit or Lemmy to scan for illegal activities oj a photo?
You need a place to store the files. Pictures are just a type of file.
Using them do add one or two extra steps before posting. Images can hog up server resources and using these third-party sites reduces the burden for the server of your instance which is run by volunteers/hobbyists with money often coming from their own pockets. Its just a nice thing to voluntarily do.
On the other hand, it’s great that some instances have file size limits. It forces users to look at these image hosts instead of them just recklessly uploading images into the servers as if Lemmy is housed in a Palo Alto facility.
