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/
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.
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
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.
You can just use fediverse (eg. kbin) to upload your image directly, without any of those instances?
You could also use Pixelfed
Correct! Shout out to @dansup, who created Pixelfed. Which is a wonderful piece of software.
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.
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.
Doesn’t work for animated things.
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
I like that imgur removes exif data, any recommendations that do that too?
I took a look at a few posted and they don’t appear to do so.
Looks like they are a paid service. But still cool.
How about for videos, OP? Any recommendations other than Streamable?
Someone mentioned imgchest.com and seem to work well. Here is a video I just uploaded https://imgchest.com/p/a8463xlg4xj
Also let me know if the below embed works on Lemmy. It seem to work on kbin, but I am not sure if lemmy supports video embeds.
Awesome find! I’ll give it a shot and recommend it to our community. Thanks!
Edit: Indeed, it works!
Hey, to embed properly you need to use the direct link ending with .mp4. Otherwise, only a thumbnail of the video will be shown. You will find the direct link by clicking on the dropdown that appears when you hover the video at imgchest.com. Here is a proper embed of your video.
It’s kind of crazy how these popular services are always insistent on killing themselves off with these horrible changes.
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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.
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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
If you’re into self hosting, this repository is simple to install and use for sharing images.
I feel like self hosted is where most linked images eventually disappear. Much more so than image hoster platforms - where it obviously varies too, some disappear.
Yes! Thank you, this fixed my gif post earlier that wouldn’t load from Imgur. Imgbb worked fine for what it is.
Imgur hates my guts anyways. They are based on easily ignitable populism and then its people wonders why everyone acts like they’ve burnt all their bridges.
How on earth do I keep my photos from rotating in all of these?
I take a picture on my phone in portrait. I upload it, it’s rotated to landscape. I look at the EXIF, pic on my phone says it’s rotated 90. If I delete that, it rotates to landscape. What do I need to do to keep it vertical?
