I believe there are pros and cons for both. Imgur is great because you truly don’t have to think about disk space or bandwidth. Imgur is not great because they can delete your posts at any time without warning and leave holes on the interenet, especially if we’re talking 5, 10 , 20 years from now.
Should I invest in a beefy server to store all of my photo needs without storage anixety? Or should I just rely on a larger company to handle it for me? I think I’m already answering my own question by writing this post out, but I’d love to hear from the self hosting community.
I absolutely would not trust imgur… I wouldn’t trust anyone else with any of my data except as an encrypted offsite backup.
You do not need a beefy server either, you just need the storage space for it. And storage is relatively cheap. The only thing I would recommend is that if you are going to selfhost, that you realize you are responsible for your data; that means backups.
I’d think that a few terrabytes in a server would mean that you wouldn’t have to worry about image files for a while
There’s another option- cloud hosting in a cloud you control. You can also put a CDN infront of a not-so-beefy home server to avoid getting overwhelmed.
I was about to reply that not every user should be expected to self-host instances, but checked where I was before hitting send. A CDN to front images is a great option, but iirc the cache headers still aren’t sorted out properly, so be wary about fronting your whole Lemmy instance with a CDN.
I wouldn’t trust Imgur or any other cloud hosting for that matter. In addition to the risk of them closing up shop without warning, they could simply decide they don’t like you. (Looking at you Google.)
If all your looking for is remote photo storage and sharing, you don’t really need a “beefy” server. You could do that on something as low power as a rpi 3. It would be painfully slow but it would be doable. For that task you mostly just need storage. Possibly lots and lots of storage.
Here’s a few projects you might look at:
Personally, I use nextcloud and it works for my needs, but I’ve heard good things about photoprism. Piwigo looks interesting but I don’t know much about it.
Depending on your needs https://pixelfed.org/ might suit you as well.
You mentioned a timescale for data retention of decades which means doing it yourself is the only option.
Nothing that exists now existed either 20 years before now or is likely to exist in 20 years: I’m sure you can still download all those photos off your Friendster account or from photobucket (in case of confusion: lol no).
Of course with a multi-decade requirement, then you’re going to have to manage hardware, backups, and validating data integrity. The last one being the big one because everything will bitrot if you give it enough time, so it’s not like it’s just drop it on a drive and forget about it.
Please use a proper image host. When your uploads get federated, if they are uploaded directly to lemmy, the images get federated as well. While you may have a large server, a lot of people don’t.
It even says on the lemmy docs to use a third party image service that’s built to host images:
Note that this functionality is not meant to share large images or videos, because that would require too many server resources. Instead, upload them on another platform like PeerTube or Pixelfed, and share the link on Lemmy.
Someone made a post the other day (since deleted) asking why their instance was slow after they uploaded NINETY high res images in one post. Please don’t be that person.
I’ve been looking for a way to cache images elsewhere instead of on my server as they are federated here, as my instance is tiny. I’m hoping I can find a way that’s not a bucket someplace as I don’t trust myself to not mess one of those up and end up with a massive bill.
