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.

  • somedaysoon@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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.

  • VexCatalyst@lemmy.fmhy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • carl_dungeon@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • charles@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.