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.
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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.
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.
I’d think that a few terrabytes in a server would mean that you wouldn’t have to worry about image files for a while
should I just rely on a larger company to handle it for me?
No, unless you have a paid contract with them that specifies heavy liability if they decide to screw you
You are talking about your own photos or photos you wanna share with others? If it is the former, with all due respect but I have to say it is insane to put them all to imgur. Heck even uploading them all to Google Cloud is a lot more reasonable… If it is the latter, it is fine as long as you are not expecting the images to live forever.
You mentioned a timescale for data retention of decades which means doing it yourself is the only option.
Nothing that exists now existed either 20 years before now or is likely to exist in 20 years: I’m sure you can still download all those photos off your Friendster account or from photobucket (in case of confusion: lol no).
Of course with a multi-decade requirement, then you’re going to have to manage hardware, backups, and validating data integrity. The last one being the big one because everything will bitrot if you give it enough time, so it’s not like it’s just drop it on a drive and forget about it.
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.
Most people do not have the knowledge, financial security, and attention span to self host anything for five years. Even fewer have all three, and if you self-host, holes in the internet still appear when you die.
Imgur sucks, but self-hosting is not a good solution to the problem.
