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So I got fed up with current image hosting solutions the other day, because I realized free image hosting is unsustainable and Imgur has turned into a social ne

So I got fed up with current image hosting solutions the other day, because I realized free image hosting is unsustainable and Imgur has turned into a social network, which is the opposite of what I want. So, I figured I'd create my own paid one, and am working on https://imgz.org https://imgz.org. However, I want to add a free tier for people who are willing to host their own images, and was thinking of writing a daemon that would run on the user's computer and store all their images on a directory there. It would have to be mostly-on, but not always-on, since I'm going to be using a caching CDN. Is this a good idea? I don't know how many people would know how/want to run this, but it feels empowering from a data ownership perspective. What does everyone here think?

imhoguy 7y ago
Sounds like IPFS and pinning.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  Kind of, except it will work.
  - jimpick 7y ago
    IPFS works fine. I'm on the IPFS team and I use it everyday. Depending on the app, it may or may not be a good fit. The performance you get out of it depends a lot on what features you are using. There's a whole ecosystem of projects (eg. IPFS Companion, IPFS Desktop, IPFS Cluster) and 3rd-party services which are important to consider when deploying a production-ready app. There's a lot of work ongoing to solve some of the biggest pain points (eg. content discovery across NATs), so expect the performance profile to improve dramatically in the short term and for it to become an option for many more apps.
    - StavrosK 7y ago
      > IPFS works fine. I'm on the IPFS team and I use it everyday. I run Eternum.io and IPFS has been such a pain that I am considering just shutting the service down. The node has been consuming so much RAM and CPU (even though it's behind a caching proxy and the gateway should get minimal traffic) that it was disrupting everything else on the server. The memory leaks have been off the charts for ages, so now I just restart the node every day. I set up IPFS cluster on that and another machine with the intention of moving node to the second machine, I waited for weeks for files to be pinned between the two nodes but the queued count was going up and down. In the end I set the pinning timeout to ten seconds and it finished faster, and still a bunch of files didn't manage to pin, even though the two nodes were directly connected (`ipfs swarm connect`). I shut the first node down anyway because I couldn't deal with it any more. At least now the rest of the stuff on the server isn't flapping every day. And this is on top of the atrocious pin handling that requires you to have a connection open to the IPFS daemon when you want to pin a CID for the entire duration of the pin. I opened a ticket years ago to get a sort of download manager in the node so we could have pins happen asynchronously, but there has been no movement on that at all. I'm glad it works well for you, but it has been nothing but pain for me. Hell, most of the time the gateway doesn't manage to discover files I have pinned on my local computer. I really want something like IPFS to succeed, because it has immense potential to literally change the world, but I can't even recommend that people run a node locally because I know it's going to eat their battery and slow their computer down. I don't know why these problems haven't gone away after years of work and millions in funding.
      - jimpick 7y ago
        Sorry to hear about your bad experiences. I think I've experienced some of the same frustrations at times, and I think most of the bugs/problems are well known to the development team and are being actively worked on. It's a very open process. I know there's been a lot of improvement in the year that I've been working on it. The release train moves along slowly at times, especially as we are actively working on improving our testing processes.
        StavrosK 7y ago
        Thanks, I'm sure you're working on it, and I hope everything gets solved and IPFS is awesome enough to use for archival, distribution, security, censorship-resistance, and the whole other bunch of things that are necessary and that made me create Eternum in the first place. I'm just frustrated with the glacial progress I'm seeing as an end user...
mceachen 7y ago
I've been working on PhotoStructure (not so much to be an imgur replacement, but as a way to automatically organize and share my large (many tb) and disorganized (due to failed photo apps and cos) pile of photos and videos. I'm releasing to a new wave of beta users soon if you want to sign up and try it out. It's a self-hosted solution with a web UI. https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/ https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/ As one entrepreneur/engineer to another: Don't underestimate the legal and logistical effort you'll incur from a caching CDN. People post pirated, abusive, and generally bad things, and if it's on your server, it's (becoming moreso) your responsibility. DMCA and takedowns will consume noon-trivial time, and makes simple corporate insurance decidedly not simple (or cheap). It's typical for media hosting companies to hire teams to handle these issues. I was shocked while working at CNET (way back when) when I found out most of a floor (in a large building) was for webshots' trust and safety team.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  > It's a self-hosted solution with a web UI That sounds great, thanks! Is there an easy way for me to distinguish photographs from my photography work from snapshots I took with my phone? By the way, your "Get early access" button does nothing on Firefox beta with uBlock/Privacy Badger. > People post pirated, abusive, and generally bad things Oh ugh :( I was hoping this would be curtailed by the fact that this service is paid-only, although I now realize I might have to rethink my "accepting cryptocurrency" idea. Thanks for the heads up!
  - mceachen 7y ago
    > Is there an easy way for me to distinguish photographs from my photography work from snapshots I took with my phone? Yeah! You can browse by camera (and by lens). Thanks for the heads-up on the get early access button issue! The link just scrolls you down to the bottom of the page where the login form is. I use FF with privacy badger and ublock (and a pihole) on linux and android, and both of those work. What OS are you using?
    - 7y ago

imhoguy 7y ago

Sounds like IPFS and pinning.

StavrosK 7y ago
Kind of, except it will work.
- jimpick 7y ago
  IPFS works fine. I'm on the IPFS team and I use it everyday. Depending on the app, it may or may not be a good fit. The performance you get out of it depends a lot on what features you are using. There's a whole ecosystem of projects (eg. IPFS Companion, IPFS Desktop, IPFS Cluster) and 3rd-party services which are important to consider when deploying a production-ready app. There's a lot of work ongoing to solve some of the biggest pain points (eg. content discovery across NATs), so expect the performance profile to improve dramatically in the short term and for it to become an option for many more apps.
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    > IPFS works fine. I'm on the IPFS team and I use it everyday. I run Eternum.io and IPFS has been such a pain that I am considering just shutting the service down. The node has been consuming so much RAM and CPU (even though it's behind a caching proxy and the gateway should get minimal traffic) that it was disrupting everything else on the server. The memory leaks have been off the charts for ages, so now I just restart the node every day. I set up IPFS cluster on that and another machine with the intention of moving node to the second machine, I waited for weeks for files to be pinned between the two nodes but the queued count was going up and down. In the end I set the pinning timeout to ten seconds and it finished faster, and still a bunch of files didn't manage to pin, even though the two nodes were directly connected (`ipfs swarm connect`). I shut the first node down anyway because I couldn't deal with it any more. At least now the rest of the stuff on the server isn't flapping every day. And this is on top of the atrocious pin handling that requires you to have a connection open to the IPFS daemon when you want to pin a CID for the entire duration of the pin. I opened a ticket years ago to get a sort of download manager in the node so we could have pins happen asynchronously, but there has been no movement on that at all. I'm glad it works well for you, but it has been nothing but pain for me. Hell, most of the time the gateway doesn't manage to discover files I have pinned on my local computer. I really want something like IPFS to succeed, because it has immense potential to literally change the world, but I can't even recommend that people run a node locally because I know it's going to eat their battery and slow their computer down. I don't know why these problems haven't gone away after years of work and millions in funding.
    - jimpick 7y ago
      Sorry to hear about your bad experiences. I think I've experienced some of the same frustrations at times, and I think most of the bugs/problems are well known to the development team and are being actively worked on. It's a very open process. I know there's been a lot of improvement in the year that I've been working on it. The release train moves along slowly at times, especially as we are actively working on improving our testing processes.
      - StavrosK 7y ago
        Thanks, I'm sure you're working on it, and I hope everything gets solved and IPFS is awesome enough to use for archival, distribution, security, censorship-resistance, and the whole other bunch of things that are necessary and that made me create Eternum in the first place. I'm just frustrated with the glacial progress I'm seeing as an end user...

mceachen 7y ago

I've been working on PhotoStructure (not so much to be an imgur replacement, but as a way to automatically organize and share my large (many tb) and disorganized (due to failed photo apps and cos) pile of photos and videos. I'm releasing to a new wave of beta users soon if you want to sign up and try it out. It's a self-hosted solution with a web UI. https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/ https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/ As one entrepreneur/engineer to another: Don't underestimate the legal and logistical effort you'll incur from a caching CDN. People post pirated, abusive, and generally bad things, and if it's on your server, it's (becoming moreso) your responsibility. DMCA and takedowns will consume noon-trivial time, and makes simple corporate insurance decidedly not simple (or cheap). It's typical for media hosting companies to hire teams to handle these issues. I was shocked while working at CNET (way back when) when I found out most of a floor (in a large building) was for webshots' trust and safety team.

StavrosK 7y ago
> It's a self-hosted solution with a web UI That sounds great, thanks! Is there an easy way for me to distinguish photographs from my photography work from snapshots I took with my phone? By the way, your "Get early access" button does nothing on Firefox beta with uBlock/Privacy Badger. > People post pirated, abusive, and generally bad things Oh ugh :( I was hoping this would be curtailed by the fact that this service is paid-only, although I now realize I might have to rethink my "accepting cryptocurrency" idea. Thanks for the heads up!
- mceachen 7y ago
  > Is there an easy way for me to distinguish photographs from my photography work from snapshots I took with my phone? Yeah! You can browse by camera (and by lens). Thanks for the heads-up on the get early access button issue! The link just scrolls you down to the bottom of the page where the login form is. I use FF with privacy badger and ublock (and a pihole) on linux and android, and both of those work. What OS are you using?
  - 7y ago