Seeking Image Host Recs
Apr. 28th, 2025 11:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
Let's face it: I love Dreamwidth, but it's going to be a long time before it has image hosting interface that a lot of former Tumblr users, or new web users in general, are going to find intuitive. I've got a tutorial for it on my to-do list, but in the mean time, we have another problem:
Free accounts only get 500 MB of storage; regular paid accounts get 1.5 GB, and premium paid accounts get 3 GB, but there are artists out there who will absolutely blow right through that amount of storage in short order. On top of that, it doesn't allow hotlinking of images anywhere.
Dreamwidth happily hosts and defends NSFW content, and has a history of stability to boot, but for a lot of artists out there, that's not enough to go on.
So what are the other options out there?
tesscodes goes over some in a fair amount of detail here, and
elyusion summarizes some not in the previous post here; meanwhile, a Tumblr user suggested Amazon's s3 as a hosting option, pointing out that, since a lot of businesses use it for legal stuff, it's unlikely to be scraped for AI, but, like Google Docs, doesn't really do hotlinking. (Separately, I'm also going to add that Neocities allows hotlinking with a paid account, but doesn't encourage it.)
Do you know of any others? Can you recommend one in particular, either from the posts linked above or that you know of otherwise? Please share in the comments so we can get some solid recommendations!
Free accounts only get 500 MB of storage; regular paid accounts get 1.5 GB, and premium paid accounts get 3 GB, but there are artists out there who will absolutely blow right through that amount of storage in short order. On top of that, it doesn't allow hotlinking of images anywhere.
Dreamwidth happily hosts and defends NSFW content, and has a history of stability to boot, but for a lot of artists out there, that's not enough to go on.
So what are the other options out there?
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Do you know of any others? Can you recommend one in particular, either from the posts linked above or that you know of otherwise? Please share in the comments so we can get some solid recommendations!
no subject
Date: Apr. 29th, 2025 04:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Apr. 29th, 2025 11:50 pm (UTC)Weird question - is Squidge specifically for fanart, or can official media (magazine scans, model sheets, etc) be posted there too? And for that latter use case, is there a way to reverse image search to see if the image has already been posted, to avoid redundant usage of server space?
no subject
Date: Apr. 30th, 2025 01:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: May. 1st, 2025 10:53 pm (UTC)eta: I think I misunderstood the question. I thought it was "can this be used as a general image host". Seems it was "only specifically art or is other fandom-related stuff okay too". That idk.
no subject
Date: May. 2nd, 2025 06:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: May. 2nd, 2025 10:11 pm (UTC)Any good alternatives for hosting official media (to use as visual reference when writing meta), then?
no subject
Date: May. 3rd, 2025 03:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Apr. 29th, 2025 07:43 am (UTC)Even going into my imgbb account, I saw that square replacing many images I had uploaded.
With some searches I found a reddit entry (I believe) explaining that it happened with low-traffic images, or something like that. I don't know if it's reliable info, but I got fed up with having to refresh my pages endless times for the images to show up again (sometimes it worked, sometimes not), so I said goodbye to the service, permanently.
I deleted all my images from imgbb and reuploaded them to SquidgeImage (mentioned in
(note: if you're selling your art and need img hosting to show your work to potential buyers, SquidgeImage is most likely NOT the service for you. Check the FAQ carefully.)
Then I went through a time-consuming task of replacing all my old imgbb links with SquidgeImage links.
So far I'm satisfied with the service and I hope it stays like this because if I have to replace all my links all over again, I swear I will cry.
Also, ditto on the observation made by
https://images.squidge.org/
no subject
Date: Apr. 29th, 2025 08:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Apr. 29th, 2025 11:38 am (UTC)On a side note to anyone looking for image hosting options, please don't use Neocities for hotlinking. While they do technically allow hotlinking with a paid account, they still strongly discourage it. To quote their explanation for why it's bad: "the purpose of Neocities is not to be a "file dump", but to be a portal for people creating their own web sites. When Neocities is used as a file dump for other sites, it hurts Neocities sites by cutting into the amount of bandwidth available to them. We want to focus our resources on those sites." It is intended to be a webhost for indie web users and people new to site building; it's a valuable platform in that way and it's a shame when people harm the platform by using it outside of its intended purpose.
no subject
Date: Apr. 29th, 2025 01:52 pm (UTC)I agree with
no subject
Date: Apr. 29th, 2025 11:18 pm (UTC)From the lists offered it seems like Dropbox is the most useful, but only if you're willing to pay for an account. That said, there's a high limit for all sorts of storage. I use Carbonite for my file backups so I don't want to pay for a second cloud storage account but if one considers it a kind of insurance for your data it seems worthwhile.
no subject
Date: May. 1st, 2025 11:57 am (UTC)i use catbox! i can't speak to the longevity, but it's pretty reliable from what i've used it for and seems pretty decently funded. there's only a file limit for individual files (rather than each user), and you can make an account if you want to keep track of your stuff
i also know of file garden which has sort of a more drive-like setup. i don't know much about it since i haven't used it myself