this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Technology

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

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (8 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Haven't they always, though? Pretty sure since the beginning it purged anything that hasn't been viewed for something like 6 months or so. That's why you got a lot of dead links in old Reddit (or others) posts

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I don't think so, I've never had this happen in the few cases where I revisited an imgur url after years of not visiting it

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

They just stopped hosting porn. Dont know why OP is asking but quite a few people were scrambling for a replacement a couple of weeks ago on reddit.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Requires an account to upload these days.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I just tried it and no account required (yet?). Uploading works fine.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

pixelfed might work for you.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Looks interesting and I will def be joining, but it does seem more instagramy than specifically free image hosting.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, but you can ignore that and hotlink the images, I believe.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

you can also copy and image and paste it straight into the text box, it will upload and embed the image:

This is straight from greenshot.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

First thing I thought of as well. I like that they allow image expiration and not just forever.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Catbox is a robust looking option that I've experimented with. I'm a bit concerned that they're blocked in a few countries, though.

Blocked countries, sourced from above FAQ

  • Australia: DNS block. "Decided that Catbox was a terrorist propaganda spreading website." Explicitly defining DNS serves to a public server is required to access site and files.
  • Ireland/UK: IP block. "Clips of [football] games being uploaded to Catbox." VPN required to access site and files.
  • Iran: IP block. "Uknown, but I'm sure you can probably make some pretty accurate guesses." VPN required.
  • Afghanistan: Ditto above.

I'm not sure if that would be a massive issue for most Beehaw users, but personally I'm not a fan of having content potentially inaccessible or at least requiring additional tools to access.

Otherwise I couldn't recommend Catbox enough, which is what really bums me out. Massive uncompressed file sizes, indefinite file retention, wide file support, direct file linking, the place has the works. If Catbox wasn't already blocked to a mild degree in the mentioned countries, I would be all in on recommending them.

Related: If anyone is in one of the listed countries above, I'd appreciate it if you tried to access the site and some direct file links and reporting back if a VPN or public DNS is indeed required. There's the catbox test Millions has below and I have a file of my own for good measure.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

Edit: sp

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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 👨‍💻

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They delete your photos if they're unaccessed by the uploader after a year unfortunately. Ask me how I found out :(

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I found this because I was testing out nostr and suddenly had loli.net in the firewall logs (apparently a content delivery network): https://sm.ms/

I like it because it gives you markdown you can paste into lemmy :D

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I use vgy.me, it doesn't support video uploads but it does have markdown in the image page

edit: switched to catbox because i learned that vgy autoremoves after a year

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

anonfiles.com

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I've been using my Onedrive storage that comes with my Office subscription. It's not ideal but at least I have some control over how longer the link is available.

Since you're asking for an imgur alternative, I assume that you're looking for something free. My suggestion might not be what you're looking for.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

No they don't? 🤔 I'm pretty sure they did once, but right now I am able to upload images with no account. Just dragging the file into the browser window works.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I have been using lensdump

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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

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