Image Hosting Sites

[craftyhobbit]

I know that in general, people use image hosting sites to save space on their hosting account, or need them for their blogs, making posts in forums and other places around the web, but my experience over the years with them hasn't been that great. From image hosting services disappearing with no warning over night (I'm looking at you, image cave and nicpic host!) photobucket putting watermarks to advertise their services on to images and now imgur blocking people from outside of the US from viewing them (quite a lot of neocities websites and code groups here on dreamwidth like dreamcodes and fandom icons have a lot of their content unviewable to me). It's not a great visitor experience when you come across a site that has 'content not viewable in your region' all across the page, and an headache for website creators when they find that they've lost all their images, or have ugly watermarks all over their images that they've not put there. People are better off hosting images with their website host, blog host, etc. I don't know what the solution is for forum users.

Comments

[claudeb]

True, I don't know a lot of reliable image hosting services outside of catbox.moe; good thing DreamWidth offers a decent quota even on the free plan. Not sure how this state of affairs could be improved.

[axolotls]

There's also Squidge Images for fannish use!

[harlow_turner_chaotic_ace]

Seconding squidge! It's awesome and built for fandom.

Postimages is also decent for general use.

[althea_valara]

Ravelry (a knitting and crochet website) solved this by offering image hosting for forum-posted images for a nominal US$5 yearly fee. Of course, you don't HAVE to pay that if you have somewhere you can hotlink images from (I still post some from Flickr sometimes, because I uploaded them way back when Ravelry was new and didn't have its own image hosting) but I think the fee is worth it to post, say, pics of cats or screenshots of Ravelry features (I like to help other members with how to use the site).

They've also made it so posting images of your patterns, projects and yarn is FREE--you just need an account on the site. By default, project pages are only shown to logged-in users, but you can set the pages to be viewable by others not on Ravelry. People posting images of their projects and yarn helps build the database -- it is really helping to, say, see what a yarn looks like in different lighting! -- so that's why they don't charge for that.

Really, I think this is an ingenuous way to go about it.

I think hotlinking is the biggest issue. I doubt I can hotlink to a image on Ravelry, because it's not meant to do that. I have images on my personal websites (both a Neocities-hosted fan site, and a more personal site with its own domain name, hosted on Porkbun) and TBH I'm not sure if I can hotlink to those. But, I wouldn't want to? If I want to show someone a craft I made, for example, I'd link them to the page on my personal site that has that craft directly rather than hotlink the image. For example, here is my doll of Aerith from Final Fantasy VII: https://altheavalara.games/crafts/aerith.html

I do use Dreamwidth's image hosting, and it is part of why I have a paid account. But I mostly only need that to host images in my own journal.

I hear you on icon communities, though. I participated in one once, and having to find a host for the images was an issue. I can't remember what host I ended up going with--I think imgur, but this was before they limited the countries that can view it. I don't know what the solution is, there.