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 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.