I believe there are pros and cons for both. Imgur is great because you truly don’t have to think about disk space or bandwidth. Imgur is not great because they can delete your posts at any time without warning and leave holes on the interenet, especially if we’re talking 5, 10 , 20 years from now.
Should I invest in a beefy server to store all of my photo needs without storage anixety? Or should I just rely on a larger company to handle it for me? I think I’m already answering my own question by writing this post out, but I’d love to hear from the self hosting community.
I absolutely would not trust imgur… I wouldn’t trust anyone else with any of my data except as an encrypted offsite backup.
You do not need a beefy server either, you just need the storage space for it. And storage is relatively cheap. The only thing I would recommend is that if you are going to selfhost, that you realize you are responsible for your data; that means backups.
I’d think that a few terrabytes in a server would mean that you wouldn’t have to worry about image files for a while
Please use a proper image host. When your uploads get federated, if they are uploaded directly to lemmy, the images get federated as well. While you may have a large server, a lot of people don’t.
It even says on the lemmy docs to use a third party image service that’s built to host images:
Note that this functionality is not meant to share large images or videos, because that would require too many server resources. Instead, upload them on another platform like PeerTube or Pixelfed, and share the link on Lemmy.
Someone made a post the other day (since deleted) asking why their instance was slow after they uploaded NINETY high res images in one post. Please don’t be that person.
I’ve been looking for a way to cache images elsewhere instead of on my server as they are federated here, as my instance is tiny. I’m hoping I can find a way that’s not a bucket someplace as I don’t trust myself to not mess one of those up and end up with a massive bill.
should I just rely on a larger company to handle it for me?
No, unless you have a paid contract with them that specifies heavy liability if they decide to screw you
You are talking about your own photos or photos you wanna share with others? If it is the former, with all due respect but I have to say it is insane to put them all to imgur. Heck even uploading them all to Google Cloud is a lot more reasonable… If it is the latter, it is fine as long as you are not expecting the images to live forever.
There’s another option- cloud hosting in a cloud you control. You can also put a CDN infront of a not-so-beefy home server to avoid getting overwhelmed.
I was about to reply that not every user should be expected to self-host instances, but checked where I was before hitting send. A CDN to front images is a great option, but iirc the cache headers still aren’t sorted out properly, so be wary about fronting your whole Lemmy instance with a CDN.
