Seeking Image Host Recs

[soc_puppet]

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!

Comments

[malymin]

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?

[aflatmirror]

I do not know for sure. From what I've read of the TOS, you can use it for anything non-commercial. I think there is not a reverse image search, it's pretty low tech

[arcanetrivia]

Right on the front page when I went to check it out: "This site is for FANDOM use only. If you are not in fandom, please use a different service. If you want to know what is allowed, you can click here to read this site's Terms of Service"

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.

[soc_puppet]

I'm going to make an educated guess here: I would say that Squidge is for hosting images you, yourself create, the same way that its fanfic hosting site and AO3 are for hosting fanworks that you (general you) create. I haven't read their TOS so I can't say for sure, but that would be my guess based on the fact that it's supposed to be for "fandom" content and that Squidge is also hosting a fanfic archive.

[malymin]

Any good alternatives for hosting official media (to use as visual reference when writing meta), then?

[ratsplain]

From what I've seen Walter (the guy that runs Squidge) is pretty chill and responsive and available on Tumblr @ squidgiepdx if you wanna ask him directly