Is there any good alternative to imgur for uploading screenshots?

gabuwu@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 30 points –

I mainly use imgur to upload screenshots using sharex, would appreciate being pointed in the direction of any alternative.

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Been considering to self-host, Imgur clearly no longer wants to be in the image hosting business and wants to focus on their "community" instead

do they have a sizable community? honestly i just assumed it was almost exclusively used for image hosting.

It's home to a very strange community unaware that their "platform" was just an image host for users of an actual social media platform. Well, at least it was before imgur recently started adding social media features and purged nsfw content.

Popular image posts from reddit would routinely get boosted (sans context) to the top of imgur's homepage, which would attract confused, angry, and often unintentionally hilarious comments from imgur users. Iirc there was a subreddit dedicated to this phenomenon.

If you want something very cheap (though not necessarily totally free), and within your control, just get an AWS S3 bucket and put them there. Or possibly Backblaze.

Yep, I'm gradually shifting to S3 for my public direct file sharing as a bit of an exercise in learning AWS. It's not free, but 99.99% of the time it's remarkably cheap. If you're willing to put up with learning AWS (or any other general-purpose platform really, cloud or self-hosted,) there's a nice feeling that comes with having more leniency to do things your way and on your terms.

Now whether it works properly, however, let alone work at all, is an entirely different story. But that's the double-edged sword with going out on your own: it's more likely to be your fault, not someone else's.

id be pretty psyched if my video embedding starts working one of these days 👨‍💻 yippee—

I've not looked into it fully but there is that pixelfed which is a part of the fediverse, don't know how it works for public images and whatnot though since it touts itself as a secure platform where you can choose who can see your stuff kind of deal

You can upload an image when creating a post by clicking on the small thumbnail icon at the bottom right of the file input

Some instances/servers are currently not capable of uploads larger than ~100kb, so a good image CDN is desired.

I also feel like lots of people uploading images directly to an instance's servers put a lot more strain on them - especially at a time where most servers are experiencing serious growing pains and may not really have the funds to keep expanding their storage. They're not ad supported like places like Reddit are.

I think it would be courteous of us to try and spread it out a bit and use services specifically intended for and set up for image hosting.

I'm not sure about the longevity but a lot of people use discord as CDN apparently. There's even an API for that.

We should really try to stick to federated FOSS choices, so that we don't have a future nightmare on our hands.

What's there to federate about image cdn? If you don't want to use 3rd party service just self host. You just have to make compromises either way.

We actually feature a federated image hosting service on lemmy, there isn't much to image hosting to federate, you're right, but we shouldn't rely on imgur or discord or anything centralized wherever possible to avoid centralization of control over our media.

What's really the difference between a federated Lemmy instance for hosting vs a 3rd party anyways?

If another Lemmy instance goes down, all the content on it is gone anyways. Federated != Mirrored. Just because you can browse the content doesn't mean it's safe from going away at the whims of one person

As someone who doesn't know, what's wrong with imgur?

Edit: Thanks for the info guys.

Imgur announced recently they are going to be purging images that haven't been viewed for x amount of time.

They also banned porn. You know, most of the traffic.

If you’re just shitposting dank memes, having the pictures deleted after a while shouldn’t be a big problem. If you’re posting something a bit more valuable, consider keeping the pictures on flickr or even pixelfed.

Is pixelfed really a good way to prevent dead links? I don't know much about it other than that it's part of the fediverse, so I'd assume any pictures hosted there last only as long as the instance they're posted to.

If you choose to use Pixelfed, you should probably be active in your chosen instance and donate regularly.

I suppose you're right, though that's quite involved when all I want is to host an image.

Using flickr or google would be a lighter option. If you put some pictures in a place like that, they are probably going to stay there, but the TOS does leave a very convenient backdoor open. If flickr messes up a database migration, or the datacenter gets hit by a meteor one day, and all of your photos disappear, you can’t hold them accountable. Every option has some issues…

That's not necessarily a bad thing, as long as you aren't using it for archival purposes. I would prefer not everything I post live forever.

While I'd agree for identifying pictures, image hosting that suddenly doesn't one day becomes a huge problem for a lot of old tutorial-based content. Look at any old car forum for examples.