If you have the time and the inclination, you could build your own tool—understandably that's a lot of work, but it's usually a fun side project where you get to connect the lego bricks together...
If you have the time and the inclination, you could build your own tool—understandably that's a lot of work, but it's usually a fun side project where you get to connect the lego bricks together and experiment. Do you want to store in S3? What's your URL schema going to be? It's a vertically integrated stack of fun.
I run my own image hosting service on a dotnet core server, hosted on DigitalOcean, that stores uploaded files in a DigitalOcean spaces bucket (S3 compatible). From the client side, I built a simple Vue client side interface with drag and drop uploads, that shows the most recent files uploaded in the past few days, with helpful bits of functionality like one-click to copy the URL, and an auto-deletion setting to control how ephemeral the uploaded files are.
I also built together a quick iOS shortcut to make it easy to upload images and files to my server directly from the iOS share sheet. I still need to write a macOS wrapper to hook into the screenshot event, which is my biggest thorn in my side at the moment.
To me, ease of use is far more important than worrying about file size optimisation. In practice I've never found I needed to compress images on the fly—I end up doing it prior to upload usually. Obviously everyone's needs will differ, though. Regarding EXIF data, I don't currently scrub location and camera information, although I should. My images don't usually go to many people, and they get deleted pretty quick, so for now I just rely on pseudo-obscurity on that front.
I've used Pixelfed. It really is meant to be an Instagram-alike that federates, not an image host like Imgur. But you could try hotlinking to images on there and see how that goes. There are...
I've used Pixelfed. It really is meant to be an Instagram-alike that federates, not an image host like Imgur. But you could try hotlinking to images on there and see how that goes.
There are plenty of places to upload images that are just no-nonsense image hosts. But I wouldn't recommend any of them. I remember when Imgur started, and being a no-nonsense image host (mostly for Reddit) was the whole point of Imgur. Over the years, no-nonsense image hosts that see nontrivial usage will invariably accumulate nonsense, as they struggle to pay for the costs of serving big files to many people for free. You can pick one you like the look of right now, but 5 years from now you probably won't like it so much.
You can self-host your images; if you're trying to fill the use case of Imgur, you probably want to run a (pre-written) web app for uploading and optimizing images instead of just dumping them in a directory. But then if your image becomes popular you suddenly need a CDN. Maybe put Cloudflare in front of it? You also have the problem of what happens to your images when you decide to take down your self-hosting server.
I was always a fan of the ipfs.pics style of doing things, where the image host inserts the image into a peer to peer network, and you can send people to a CDN that gateways to the peer to peer network to get the actual image. That way you could self host without your images necessarily disappearing when your tiny server does. But I don't think ipfs.pics actually executed it very well: they ran their own gateway instead of actually using the (venture funded) main one, the uploader wasn't very polished and the whole project seems deprecated now. And maybe the Law of Accumulated Nonsense applies just as much to P2P network gateways as it does to image hosts.
To host an image properly, you must first invent and widely deploy content-centric networking, is the real answer. All the other solutions are kinda bad.
Check out the Privacytools.io recommendation for metadata removal tools (they recommend MAT2 or ExifCleaner). There's also a handy webapp for removing exif metadata and blurring sections of...
Backblaze works for me, they have a small amount of free storage. Also you can direct link, example https://f002.backblazeb2.com/file/0Tl4aD/0RfmO1.jpg
Backblaze works for me, they have a small amount of free storage. Also you can direct link, example
If you use B2 + your domain with Cloudflare, bandwidth is free (via the Bandwidth Alliance: https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ ) Wasabi provides a similar service as B2 and has free...
webp doesn't work on Safari/iOS. For good crossbrowser support, JPG, PNG, and GIF is better. What many sites do is to send a webp version to browsers that support it and jpg to those that don't......
webp doesn't work on Safari/iOS. For good crossbrowser support, JPG, PNG, and GIF is better.
What many sites do is to send a webp version to browsers that support it and jpg to those that don't... but that adds some complexity.
On any mobile browser (that I know of), imgur will redirect you to the _d version which is resized. For large images (like infographics) only desktop users can actually zoom in to read the text.
On any mobile browser (that I know of), imgur will redirect you to the _d version which is resized. For large images (like infographics) only desktop users can actually zoom in to read the text.
I have recently taken to making gifs, and I have built a couple tools to make it clean. The first one is nothing more than a wrapper for FFmpeg that I use to quickly cut out a 10-30 second chunk...
As a bonus, can anyone recommend software for optimizing GIF and video files for sharing online? (Same preferences as above.)
I have recently taken to making gifs, and I have built a couple tools to make it clean.
The first one is nothing more than a wrapper for FFmpeg that I use to quickly cut out a 10-30 second chunk of video that I want to gif. It has no fancy features. https://pastebin.com/3XaXJWZv
Scale the source video down to a temporary video with the size of the final gif
Generate an optimal color palette from the video
Convert the temporary video into a gif, using the palette
Command line options are inserted directly into the ffmpeg call in step 1, so you can pass FFmpeg options after the input filename. Use environment variables HEIGHT and WIDTH to control the output size, passed to the scale filter, or the FILTER env var to replace it with something else, like a crop. https://pastebin.com/PppXSSea
What I do, and I realize this is a pretty specific solution, is host images with my Fastmail account. I get some amount of space (I forgot just how much) with my paid account, and I figure it's...
What I do, and I realize this is a pretty specific solution, is host images with my Fastmail account. I get some amount of space (I forgot just how much) with my paid account, and I figure it's going to be CDN'd or whatever for my use-case enough that I don't have to worry about it. And while the web-upload is not as easy as Imgur or the like, it's functional.
Of course, if you don't have a Fastmail account, this doesn't apply. But other email hosts might have an option like it too, if they allow you to host arbitrary files.
I think it heavily depends on your use-case. Just sharing images with a few friends? I wouldn't worry and set up an instagram-like tool, I would just use something like Dropbox/Google Drive and...
I think it heavily depends on your use-case. Just sharing images with a few friends? I wouldn't worry and set up an instagram-like tool, I would just use something like Dropbox/Google Drive and share a link. You can also decide how long it'll stay online then. With Google Photos you can also share links to images or an album and they'll remove the location data on the fly.
If it's for a blog, website or an online image gallery you want to share with the world, I'd look into tools like Pixelfed if you want to self-host these things. I guess there are also gallery-like apps for self-hosted solutions like Nextcloud and Owncloud.
Don't use Google Photos for sharing beyond personal friends, it does spooky unexpected redirects to Google Service(s) Apps on mobile (when the user is just expecting a .jpg or w/e), and is...
Don't use Google Photos for sharing beyond personal friends, it does spooky unexpected redirects to Google Service(s) Apps on mobile (when the user is just expecting a .jpg or w/e), and is probably a doxing liability.
To be honest one of the easiest approaches would probably be to create a burner Reddit account and post images to the userpage. https://i.redd.it is fast, rarely goes down, and is likely to be...
To be honest one of the easiest approaches would probably be to create a burner Reddit account and post images to the userpage. https://i.redd.it is fast, rarely goes down, and is likely to be around for years to come.
I don't think anyone mentioned it yet ... I run a Nextcloud server, which is a lot like a self-hosted version of Dropbox or Google Drive, with many (many!) optional add-ons. It might be overkill...
I don't think anyone mentioned it yet ... I run a Nextcloud server, which is a lot like a self-hosted version of Dropbox or Google Drive, with many (many!) optional add-ons.
It might be overkill just for photos, but it does include many options for sharing photos, with very granular control over who can see them, whether they can download them, and for how long.
You can self-host your own copy, or just sign up for an account.
I've been using imgur for a while and while it allows you to create albums, nowadays it no longer allows you to directly link to them (unless you use the "share embed" thing which is a PITA to...
I've been using imgur for a while and while it allows you to create albums, nowadays it no longer allows you to directly link to them (unless you use the "share embed" thing which is a PITA to use) + the little scroll menu for the albums is a pain to use as well. It was decent a few years ago, but it's a pile of shit now.
Regarding put.re: I've tried using this, but some websites apparently block that domain + uploading images takes ridiculously long for some reason. Doesn't seem to work wel.
I don't know any existing solutions, but if you wanted to write one, (personal or as a SaaS company) B2 has the best prices (compare to AWS S3), cloudflare's ToS says you can't exclusively be an...
I don't know any existing solutions, but if you wanted to write one, (personal or as a SaaS company) B2 has the best prices (compare to AWS S3), cloudflare's ToS says you can't exclusively be an image host, and nginx would probably be a great cache to use plus also has an addon module to "transform" images on the fly so you don't need to always persist thumbnails to disk.
For hosting, it depends a lot on how much control you want to have, privacy, free vs paid, etc. The solution that gives you more control is to get a domain and hosting (can be a traditional...
For hosting, it depends a lot on how much control you want to have, privacy, free vs paid, etc.
The solution that gives you more control is to get a domain and hosting (can be a traditional hosting plan or something like S3, Backblaze B2, Wasabi, etc). There are costs (monthly or yearly for hosting, yearly for the domain), depending on the content you're sharing you may have legal issues and you need to handle/pay for traffic spikes (eg: if someone shares your URL). Only you use that domain, so it will be associated with you.
Solutions like Dropbox, Google Drive, etc, usually don't have hot-linking and limit access to popular content. They may also remove public content, depending on what it is.
Free image hosting... they either become crap or close. It's hard to make money (and it's not cheap for popular services), so it's not surprising to see imgur going this path.
One other alternative is to create a blog on a platform like wordpress(.)com. You don't control the domain, but there's no need to worry about costs and bandwidth. 3GB for free for each account and you can use direct links.
You can use a GitHub repo + a web-based image upload tool for hosting your images, and you can even use your own domain. Here's a walkthrough: https://fizzy.cc/use-github-repo-to-host-images/
You can use a GitHub repo + a web-based image upload tool for hosting your images, and you can even use your own domain.
Oh, just remenbered there is http://0x0.st/ It will remove your file if there is not enough access after a period of time and it will remove after a year.
If you have the time and the inclination, you could build your own tool—understandably that's a lot of work, but it's usually a fun side project where you get to connect the lego bricks together and experiment. Do you want to store in S3? What's your URL schema going to be? It's a vertically integrated stack of fun.
I run my own image hosting service on a dotnet core server, hosted on DigitalOcean, that stores uploaded files in a DigitalOcean spaces bucket (S3 compatible). From the client side, I built a simple Vue client side interface with drag and drop uploads, that shows the most recent files uploaded in the past few days, with helpful bits of functionality like one-click to copy the URL, and an auto-deletion setting to control how ephemeral the uploaded files are.
I also built together a quick iOS shortcut to make it easy to upload images and files to my server directly from the iOS share sheet. I still need to write a macOS wrapper to hook into the screenshot event, which is my biggest thorn in my side at the moment.
To me, ease of use is far more important than worrying about file size optimisation. In practice I've never found I needed to compress images on the fly—I end up doing it prior to upload usually. Obviously everyone's needs will differ, though. Regarding EXIF data, I don't currently scrub location and camera information, although I should. My images don't usually go to many people, and they get deleted pretty quick, so for now I just rely on pseudo-obscurity on that front.
How long did it take you to set this whole system up? Sounds super interesting.
I've used Pixelfed. It really is meant to be an Instagram-alike that federates, not an image host like Imgur. But you could try hotlinking to images on there and see how that goes.
There are plenty of places to upload images that are just no-nonsense image hosts. But I wouldn't recommend any of them. I remember when Imgur started, and being a no-nonsense image host (mostly for Reddit) was the whole point of Imgur. Over the years, no-nonsense image hosts that see nontrivial usage will invariably accumulate nonsense, as they struggle to pay for the costs of serving big files to many people for free. You can pick one you like the look of right now, but 5 years from now you probably won't like it so much.
You can self-host your images; if you're trying to fill the use case of Imgur, you probably want to run a (pre-written) web app for uploading and optimizing images instead of just dumping them in a directory. But then if your image becomes popular you suddenly need a CDN. Maybe put Cloudflare in front of it? You also have the problem of what happens to your images when you decide to take down your self-hosting server.
I was always a fan of the ipfs.pics style of doing things, where the image host inserts the image into a peer to peer network, and you can send people to a CDN that gateways to the peer to peer network to get the actual image. That way you could self host without your images necessarily disappearing when your tiny server does. But I don't think ipfs.pics actually executed it very well: they ran their own gateway instead of actually using the (venture funded) main one, the uploader wasn't very polished and the whole project seems deprecated now. And maybe the Law of Accumulated Nonsense applies just as much to P2P network gateways as it does to image hosts.
To host an image properly, you must first invent and widely deploy content-centric networking, is the real answer. All the other solutions are kinda bad.
Check out the Privacytools.io recommendation for metadata removal tools (they recommend MAT2 or ExifCleaner). There's also a handy webapp for removing exif metadata and blurring sections of images.
Check out the Sharex custom uploaders for an idea of what other image hosts there are.
@KapteinB also recommended https://put.re/ as an alternative to imgur
Backblaze works for me, they have a small amount of free storage. Also you can direct link, example
https://f002.backblazeb2.com/file/0Tl4aD/0RfmO1.jpg
If you use B2 + your domain with Cloudflare, bandwidth is free (via the Bandwidth Alliance: https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ )
Wasabi provides a similar service as B2 and has free bandwidth (fair use).
Have you considered using webp files to save on bandwidth costs?
https://siipo.la/blog/is-webp-really-better-than-jpeg
webp doesn't work on Safari/iOS. For good crossbrowser support, JPG, PNG, and GIF is better.
What many sites do is to send a webp version to browsers that support it and jpg to those that don't... but that adds some complexity.
I heard it's in beta though, I'm personally taking the gamble that it'll work soon enough.
On Firefox you can just right click the image on imgur and click "view image". It will go to the direct link.
On any mobile browser (that I know of), imgur will redirect you to the
_dversion which is resized. For large images (like infographics) only desktop users can actually zoom in to read the text.Hmmm... that's a bummer.
Enabling "desktop site" on Firefox probably fixes that, but it's better finding an alternative hosting site.
I have recently taken to making gifs, and I have built a couple tools to make it clean.
The first one is nothing more than a wrapper for FFmpeg that I use to quickly cut out a 10-30 second chunk of video that I want to gif. It has no fancy features.
https://pastebin.com/3XaXJWZv
The second one, loosely based on a blog post by Giphy, has three stages:
Command line options are inserted directly into the
ffmpegcall in step 1, so you can pass FFmpeg options after the input filename. Use environment variablesHEIGHTandWIDTHto control the output size, passed to the scale filter, or theFILTERenv var to replace it with something else, like a crop.https://pastebin.com/PppXSSea
I have made many gifs with this workflow. Here are a few.
What I do, and I realize this is a pretty specific solution, is host images with my Fastmail account. I get some amount of space (I forgot just how much) with my paid account, and I figure it's going to be CDN'd or whatever for my use-case enough that I don't have to worry about it. And while the web-upload is not as easy as Imgur or the like, it's functional.
Of course, if you don't have a Fastmail account, this doesn't apply. But other email hosts might have an option like it too, if they allow you to host arbitrary files.
I think it heavily depends on your use-case. Just sharing images with a few friends? I wouldn't worry and set up an instagram-like tool, I would just use something like Dropbox/Google Drive and share a link. You can also decide how long it'll stay online then. With Google Photos you can also share links to images or an album and they'll remove the location data on the fly.
If it's for a blog, website or an online image gallery you want to share with the world, I'd look into tools like Pixelfed if you want to self-host these things. I guess there are also gallery-like apps for self-hosted solutions like Nextcloud and Owncloud.
Don't use Google Photos for sharing beyond personal friends, it does spooky unexpected redirects to Google Service(s) Apps on mobile (when the user is just expecting a .jpg or w/e), and is probably a doxing liability.
I can recommend cubeupload: https://cubeupload.com/
They're pretty cool.
To be honest one of the easiest approaches would probably be to create a burner Reddit account and post images to the userpage. https://i.redd.it is fast, rarely goes down, and is likely to be around for years to come.
I don't think anyone mentioned it yet ... I run a Nextcloud server, which is a lot like a self-hosted version of Dropbox or Google Drive, with many (many!) optional add-ons.
It might be overkill just for photos, but it does include many options for sharing photos, with very granular control over who can see them, whether they can download them, and for how long.
You can self-host your own copy, or just sign up for an account.
I've been using imgur for a while and while it allows you to create albums, nowadays it no longer allows you to directly link to them (unless you use the "share embed" thing which is a PITA to use) + the little scroll menu for the albums is a pain to use as well. It was decent a few years ago, but it's a pile of shit now.
Regarding put.re: I've tried using this, but some websites apparently block that domain + uploading images takes ridiculously long for some reason. Doesn't seem to work wel.
I don't know any existing solutions, but if you wanted to write one, (personal or as a SaaS company) B2 has the best prices (compare to AWS S3), cloudflare's ToS says you can't exclusively be an image host, and nginx would probably be a great cache to use plus also has an addon module to "transform" images on the fly so you don't need to always persist thumbnails to disk.
Currently waiting for snap.as to become a thing.
I think webp will soon be the best option (safari is the last hold out, but support is in beta now).
PNG is currently king I think, use optipng: https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-unix-optimize-lossless-png-images-with-optipng-command/
For hosting, it depends a lot on how much control you want to have, privacy, free vs paid, etc.
The solution that gives you more control is to get a domain and hosting (can be a traditional hosting plan or something like S3, Backblaze B2, Wasabi, etc). There are costs (monthly or yearly for hosting, yearly for the domain), depending on the content you're sharing you may have legal issues and you need to handle/pay for traffic spikes (eg: if someone shares your URL). Only you use that domain, so it will be associated with you.
Solutions like Dropbox, Google Drive, etc, usually don't have hot-linking and limit access to popular content. They may also remove public content, depending on what it is.
Free image hosting... they either become crap or close. It's hard to make money (and it's not cheap for popular services), so it's not surprising to see imgur going this path.
One other alternative is to create a blog on a platform like wordpress(.)com. You don't control the domain, but there's no need to worry about costs and bandwidth. 3GB for free for each account and you can use direct links.
You can use a GitHub repo + a web-based image upload tool for hosting your images, and you can even use your own domain.
Here's a walkthrough:
https://fizzy.cc/use-github-repo-to-host-images/
Oh, just remenbered there is http://0x0.st/
It will remove your file if there is not enough access after a period of time and it will remove after a year.