Minimal image self-hosting

In the Tildes Minecraft weekly thread a little while back, there was some discussion about self-hosting images. I've finally done the thing, and figured I'd share the results.

The primary goal is to make something as simple as possible: I don't really care about galleries or albums, or different file formats, or fancy automatic deduplication etc. I just want to grab an image and throw it up on a link that I can share.

I do care about easily importing images from various sources, and stripping image metadata.

The simplest solution I came up with that addresses all these while requiring minimal changes to my existing self-hosted setup is this:

• Serve a directory of static files from /var/www/i.allemangd.dev on a subdomain with a new server {} block in my existing nginx config.
• Upload images to that directory via scp. Then access is controlled by SSH and VPN and I don't need to worry about authentication.
• Convert everything to webp and strip metadata with imagemagick.
• Don't worry about albums or galleries with the automated tool. I can manually edit the folder structure or rename via ssh/sshfs, but the automated tool just dumps images to a flat directory of $(uuidgen).webp.
• Pull from the clipboard via xclip by default (I only need to support one platform), or via stdin, path, or url on the command line.
• Everything in a short autoloded zsh function, and configure destination host/dir/url by environment variables in zshrc.

The code is at https://git.allemangd.dev/me/imup. @creesch, @Durinthal, @hamstergeddon, @trim: you all participated in my call for recommendations, so have a ping here in case you're interested in the solution I've landed on.

So, with all that, I'll move some of my minecraft screenshots off of imgur via this tool:

$ imup 'https://i.imgur.com/ecokmB1.png' 'https://i.imgur.com/UNs1mlr.jpeg' 'https://i.imgur.com/83ChnpP.png' 2026-01-20_22.15.08.png 2026-01-21_23.06.18.png

https://i.allemangd.dev/911939e7-9bae-4676-a0a2-0b0d5c8cbcc5.webp (https://i.imgur.com/ecokmB1.png)
https://i.allemangd.dev/5dac5831-3cbb-48fe-a1fb-9d7fee0cdca5.webp (https://i.imgur.com/UNs1mlr.jpeg)
https://i.allemangd.dev/a4a47974-b534-4d2c-a105-b4c3ec82db48.webp (https://i.imgur.com/83ChnpP.png)
https://i.allemangd.dev/87a56e22-98c4-4a94-91cf-ccf3d183ad09.webp (2026-01-20_22.15.08.png)
https://i.allemangd.dev/a62672cf-ab08-40eb-b472-5e370cb22305.webp (2026-01-21_23.06.18.png)

I expect the two workflows from here on will be one of:

• Navigate to my minecraft screenshots directory and execute imup $(date -I)_*.png to share recent updates on the weekly thread.
• Prt Sc; "Copy to Clipboard"; imup; Paste the url.

Some adjustments I might make in the future are:

• Instead of naming the file by a uuid, name the file by a hash. This way reuploading files won't explode the size of that directory - my "weekly update" thing could just be imup *.png in the screenshots directory.

• Synchronize via rsync instead of scp. It should be faster.

• Set up an sshfs mount with this connection so my minecraft screenshots folder links directly to the static files, like https://i.allemangd.dev/mc/<date>.png. Then no manual commands are necessary. I'm a little hesitant to do that, though, since I'm not sure what happens if I put sshfs to offline host in my fstab, and probably not all my screenshots need to be public.