33
votes
What is the prefered image hosting on tildes?
Hi,
for example, on reddit the prefered image hosting is imgur (at least, most of the non reddit hosted images are hosted on imgur).
What is the prefered hosting here?
If not yet, will we have a hosting for tildes(so that users can send images directly to tildes)?
I have no intention to ever do "general" image-hosting. There might eventually be hosting for some specific purposes, like images to include on wiki pages or themes for groups, but those are generally closer to hosting for "Tildes purposes", not "user purposes".
Yes, please don't. That's a whole other can of worms with much more expensive hosting costs.
Imgur, despite it's problems, is still the most reliable and (when properly used) lightweight image host. So, for me at least, it's going to stay Imgur.
Sadly even with the direct link you get redirected to the crud on mobile.
Edit: looks like you can force a link to the real image even on mobile: https://i.imgur.com/FQkXOXp_d.png?maxwidth=9999&fidelity=high
but without all the crap on the end you get the tiny thumbnail version...
imgur's mobile experience is horrendous, even a basic wget command redirects to the web page for some ungodly reason (you need to spoof a basic desktop browser UA). Thanks for sharing the
?maxwidth=9999&fidelity=hightrick!(you also need to stick
_din front of the extension)Oops yeah I missed that, thanks.
Who would have thought looking at an image in 2018 would be so tedious!
I honestly hate Imgur and the direction the company has gone, but until there's a decent viable alternative I'll grudgingly use it. Who knows, Imgur was a product of Reddit, maybe the Tildes community will make our own image hosting service that won't suck
Making such a service (and indeed, a functionally superior service in many ways) wouldn't be that hard. The hard part would be finding a server that is capable of handling both the disk space and bandwidth requirements and then finding a way of paying for the same. I, too, hate the way imgur is going about things of late, but the need to be able to find a (financially) sustainable funding model is real.
I think people overestimate the difficulty on the funding side. Imgur was bootstrapped and profitable with around a dozen employees, before ever taking on outside investments, and before the website became bloated with heavy video ads and unwanted redirects etc. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2014/04/03/imgur-raises-40-million-from-andreessen/
Oh definitely, just look at all the failed attempts to make alternatives for Youtube that have failed over the years due to that exact reason. Granted, image hosting is less intensive then video hosting, but both need an insane amount of raw storage and bandwidth. Without an external source of income it's virtually impossible
I doubt this will happen, for a number of reasons. First of all, images are sorta low-effort content, and we want to discourage people from posting just a single image such as a meme or funny gif. Second, the site is sustained by donations, and images take a huge amount of bandwidth. We definitely can't afford an image hosting site as it stands. And then lastly, it creates all kinds of legal issues and requires moderation. Copyrighted things, illegal things, blatantly offensive things, gore, porn, etc. It'd require a lot of people to maintain.
I think you’re cutting off a huge section with marking images as low effort. Creative will probably disagree. Photography is huge on almost every board there is. That being said imgur works fine for here.
I think by linking to a page with more info than just a direct image link will still work better for ~Creative to provide more artist credit and detail. Every artist I know has at least something setup to act as an online portfolio even if it's just an Instagram profile with a link to their RedBubble or Etsy store. Even an Imgur page can have info like that versus a direct image link.
The direct image link as low-effort means to me that there is less information the people might want or need for the referenced image. Without that info it's just a "one hit" like a meme or joke image which Tildes is not wanting to setup (I can go to reddit for that if I want that).
I often find it much easier to link an image of a graph from a study, than to say "refer to figure F". I also sometimes will use infographics or other images to convey something in a more visually appealing manner than with plain text.
Do they treat images in a special way -- stripping EXIF data, maybe generating thumbnails? I know they allow serving arbitrary file uploads like .exe files so wasn't sure if images are handled differently.
Edit: Looks like at least some EXIF tags are preserved. I can see the tool and operating system used to create the JPEG, and date of creation.
It appears teknik does not strip any EXIF or XMP data from images, which is actually incredibly problematic from a privacy perspective. Not only can those have location and device information (as you pointed out) but also the complete image history and sometimes even "nondestructive edits" raw image data as well, meaning edits (such as cropping or blacking out of personal information) can be undone.
E.g. From that JPG:
Is there any specific way to get an invite code or do you just have to know someone who has one?
Only problem with Teknik is that it seems to be blocked by some AVs and Firewalls
It's honestly whatever is easiest for you. I've seen people use imgur, their personal websites, and even other random sites I've never heard of.
My guess is there won't be image hosting, at least not for a good while -- pictures take up a lot of storage space, and they would open tildes up to a few legal challenges to ensure nothing illegal is posted (that's not to say it's impossible, just unlikely in an early stage... look how long it took reddit to add image hosting.)
Even Reddit's hosting is garbage and they had a decade to get ready for it. I would not expect or want hosting here anytime in the foreseeable future.
I think most of us feel the same way. Technical challenges aside, it's a legal minefield - even displaying a thumbnail on a link submission opens you up to copyright infringements. Let the rest of the net worry about hosting images, we'll just link to whoever's doing it in the least annoying ways.
Honest question - why does everyone hate reddit's image hosting?
because it's unreliable and loads like crap.
It is horrendous on mobile
ImgTC is one Imgur alternative that is aiming to be the simple image host that Imgur started out as. Granted they will add ads, video hosting, and a public gallery. The creator tested ads and found them to be profitable enough to run the site. Which isn't all that surprising, since Imgur itself was bootstrapped and profitable from day one, up until they took VC funding.
https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/8ug5qm/imgur_is_going_the_way_of_photobucket_and/
I might have to start using this one.
imgur is blocked on my work network, and I've been using ibb.co (don't love it) to host any pics here.
While I haven't actually seen a topic on this yet, I would assume imgur, it's what most people use and it's usually the most stable with direct links.
0x0.st is really convenient
I often end up using mixtape.moe, because I used to use pomf.se but then that died because it was too much work for whoever started it. But if you're looking to make a really simple uploading site for you & yours then cloning pomf.se should be super doable, although with most of them you're unsure how long they'll still be up. mixtape.moe has been up for quite a while now so it seems to be fairly trusted. Although the spreadsheet linked from pomf.se on clones includes a good list of alternative image hosts that might be worth checking out.
mixtape.moe was a good solution a few months ago but now it's too slow for popular content. They stopped using a CDN (Cloudflare) because it was too expensive. It still works well, but RIP speed if a heavy image or video is popular on reddit.