Recomendations on image hosting services

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gflex1
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Recomendations on image hosting services

Post by gflex1 »

Could someone recommend me some image hosting service? Photobucket is a rubbish
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Lumpy Burgertushie
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Re: Recomendations on image hosting services

Post by Lumpy Burgertushie »

yes, photobucket just simply ripped everyone off.

there are a couple of extensions here to add a hosting service link to the posting page.
check them out.

robert
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Re: Recomendations on image hosting services

Post by david63 »

The problem with any hosting service for images/files is that they are liable to disappear overnight, or change their T&C's, and everything is then lost.

If the issue is with space then I would suggest that the long term solution is to buy/acquire more space and host the files yourself.
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Re: Recomendations on image hosting services

Post by HiFiKabin »

I agree with the above. I used to highly recommend postimage, but lately their servers have become a bit flaky and I suspect (only suspect mind you) that they may be going to introduce charges for their hosting.

Get a decent package with effectively 'unlimited' hosting and allow attachments. (yes I know 'unlimited' simply can not exist, but you know what I mean)
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Re: Recomendations on image hosting services

Post by Mick »

I’ve just seen a ‘proper’ host has a package free for the first year with 25gb of storage. Somebody asked the question how many images can you store with 25gb, I figure this is guesstimated as it’s relative but this was the reply:
6,000 songs
7,000 photos
100 hours of video
125,000 Word Documents
25,000 PowerPoint Presentations
200,000 spreadsheets
For a few dollars you can increase the storage available. I think 7,000 images is enough to be getting on with, it can always be bumped up at a later date.
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Re: Recomendations on image hosting services

Post by AmigoJack »

If it is for your fishing club board one of the countless picture hosters will do; imgbox and ImageBam were very reliable for almost 8 years without quirky terms of service. If you're interested I can post a long list of other hosters, along with their (dis)advantages, how long they exist and more.

Picture hosters have the advantages (over hosting it yourself) that
  • all the traffic is not yours,
  • managing the pictures is mostly easier than by doing it per phpBB attachments, and
  • potential copyright infringements (willingly or unknown) are not on your host either.
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gflex1
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Re: Recomendations on image hosting services

Post by gflex1 »

Thank U all for the help. I found over the internet https://www.cloudinary.com Is this good service?
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david63
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Re: Recomendations on image hosting services

Post by david63 »

gflex1 wrote: Wed Mar 14, 2018 5:54 pm Thank U all for the help. I found over the internet https://www.cloudinary.com Is this good service?
Never heard of it - have you Googled reviews of it?
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Re: Recomendations on image hosting services

Post by KYPREO »

Host it yourself. Whatever size requirements you have scales with the popularity/size of your board. Even if you expect a few hundred images, we're only talking about 10-20MB based on average image size of 100kb. This is easy to achieve with plupload and sensible image size limits in the ACP.

We have had attachments enabled on our board since 2007. In that time we have amassed over 42,000 attachments but this only takes up a bit over 4GB. On my host every additional gigabyte only costs US$0.50 per month so it's a minimal expenditure. And that is for a very large board with generous image size limits (1440px wide images). F

The risk and consequences of third party hosts taking down user's photos or holding them to ransom cannot be understated - this had catastrophic consequences for users on my board with 40 page topics full of images completely destroyed. Best to control the images yourself and encourage your users to use it.

The server load can be managed to a large degree through use of thumbnails & lightbox, limits limiting image attachment size and the numbers of attachments per post. You can also set locally hosted images to cache with very long expiry periods as well as compression.

Side note: the idea that there is a legal distinction between hosting locally versus remote linking from a copyright infringement perspective is largely illusory. Most jurisdictions recognise some form of ancillery liabilty for copyright infringement (eg where publishing a hotlink to an image is no different to hosting the image because you are seen as authorising or facilitating the infringement of copyright) and that the world's biggest hotbed of copyright litigation, the US, has safeharbour provisions for webhosts who offer a takedown complaints procedure for IP owners. Risks can also be mitigated by appropriate terms of use, for example users agreeing to warranties and indemnification in favour of you, the host, for IP infringement claims.
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Re: Recomendations on image hosting services

Post by Big Mac »

This is a very interesting topic.
Lumpy Burgertushie wrote: Tue Mar 13, 2018 5:52 pm there are a couple of extensions here to add a hosting service link to the posting page.
check them out.

robert
Oooh! So an external hosting service can be sort of integrated into phpBB? That sounds great. 8-)

I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out how to get the search system to help me search the Extensions page on the Customisations Database. I keep seeing what looks a bit like a forum topic.

I think I'll have to do a manual search, but there are 297 extensions to look through. Do you know what subsection they might be in? Would this sort of extension count as "Tools"?

Is there any way of seeing what the user experience of different extensions is going to look/feel like without needing to download and install them?
david63 wrote: Tue Mar 13, 2018 7:08 pm The problem with any hosting service for images/files is that they are liable to disappear overnight, or change their T&C's, and everything is then lost.

If the issue is with space then I would suggest that the long term solution is to buy/acquire more space and host the files yourself.
We have had vanishing images on the forum I help administer. :cry:

It might be possible to find the original images on a Wayback Machine copy of a topic with broken images, but I can't think of any way to automate the process of looking for broken images...and automate the recovery of pictures from the Wayback Machine (if they have them).

We are currently looking into the option of hosting images ourselves, but I don't think we have the space. (Our hosting package only gives us 2 GB and at the moment, we are trying to work out if we even have the space to rebuild our search index. :(
Mick wrote: Wed Mar 14, 2018 11:08 am I’ve just seen a ‘proper’ host has a package free for the first year with 25gb of storage. Somebody asked the question how many images can you store with 25gb, I figure this is guesstimated as it’s relative but this was the reply:
6,000 songs
7,000 photos
100 hours of video
125,000 Word Documents
25,000 PowerPoint Presentations
200,000 spreadsheets
For a few dollars you can increase the storage available. I think 7,000 images is enough to be getting on with, it can always be bumped up at a later date.
I paid for a 2 GB phpBB hosting package, for three years, but it looks like I need to move over to something like this later. Our hosting company has options to upgrade to 5 GB and 10 GB, but that's it.

I'm trying to work out what sort of split expansion in forum posts vs expansion in uploaded images would happen. Your stats look very helpful.

I'll have to have a look at the documentation to see how much control I can have on things like attachment types. Ideally, we would want to limit most users to only posting images, without preventing us from allowing moderators or admins from uploading other documents. (I guess we could probably find another way to upload stuff other than images, if it was just a few people doing that.)
KYPREO wrote: Thu Mar 15, 2018 3:14 am Host it yourself. Whatever size requirements you have scales with the popularity/size of your board. Even if you expect a few hundred images, we're only talking about 10-20MB based on average image size of 100kb. This is easy to achieve with plupload and sensible image size limits in the ACP.

We have had attachments enabled on our board since 2007. In that time we have amassed over 42,000 attachments but this only takes up a bit over 4GB. On my host every additional gigabyte only costs US$0.50 per month so it's a minimal expenditure. And that is for a very large board with generous image size limits (1440px wide images). F
Thanks Kypreo.

It sounds like your forum makes for a very useful case study!

I'll have to have a look at your forums, to see what the user experience is like there. The forum I help look after started in 2008, so I'm guessing there would be a similar user experience if we had done what you have done (if we had similar levels of traffic to you).

It sounds like you have a great hosting provider there. I think I'm going to be locked down to my own hosting company for the next two and a half years (and I don't have the energy to try migrating to another server in the near future) but it looks like I'll have to make up a checklist of things to look for in a phpBB host.
KYPREO wrote: Thu Mar 15, 2018 3:14 amThe risk and consequences of third party hosts taking down user's photos or holding them to ransom cannot be understated - this had catastrophic consequences for users on my board with 40 page topics full of images completely destroyed. Best to control the images yourself and encourage your users to use it.

The server load can be managed to a large degree through use of thumbnails & lightbox, limits limiting image attachment size and the numbers of attachments per post. You can also set locally hosted images to cache with very long expiry periods as well as compression.
We have got unlimited bandwidth, but it doesn't make sense to have pages grinding to a halt if a user puts a ton of massive pictures in a single topic. I'll have to try to find out how your thumbnails work.

What does the lightbox do? I thought that was just about having a black screen around an image? How does that cut down on server load? Do people have to click on thumbnails to surf over to a lightbox for each picture? (I see a "Thumbnails" option in the ACP, but not a "Lightbox" option. Is it an extension?)

I thought that image caching was just something that end-users had control over. Can image caching be set in the ACP? Or do I have to use something else (like .htaccess) to control image caching?
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Re: Recomendations on image hosting services

Post by HiFiKabin »

Big Mac wrote: Sun Apr 08, 2018 3:35 pm This is a very interesting topic.
Lumpy Burgertushie wrote: Tue Mar 13, 2018 5:52 pm there are a couple of extensions here to add a hosting service link to the posting page.
check them out.

robert
Oooh! So an external hosting service can be sort of integrated into phpBB? That sounds great. 8-)

I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out how to get the search system to help me search the Extensions page on the Customisations Database. I keep seeing what looks a bit like a forum topic.
viewtopic.php?f=616&t=2420316 (IMHO the best available, but has numerous timeouts of late)

viewtopic.php?f=616&t=2414691 (although it it my Extension I no longer recommend or support it. It works, but with many limitations)
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Re: Recomendations on image hosting services

Post by KYPREO »

Big Mac wrote: Sun Apr 08, 2018 3:35 pm
KYPREO wrote: Thu Mar 15, 2018 3:14 am Host it yourself. Whatever size requirements you have scales with the popularity/size of your board. Even if you expect a few hundred images, we're only talking about 10-20MB based on average image size of 100kb. This is easy to achieve with plupload and sensible image size limits in the ACP.

We have had attachments enabled on our board since 2007. In that time we have amassed over 42,000 attachments but this only takes up a bit over 4GB. On my host every additional gigabyte only costs US$0.50 per month so it's a minimal expenditure. And that is for a very large board with generous image size limits (1440px wide images). F
Thanks Kypreo.

It sounds like your forum makes for a very useful case study!

I'll have to have a look at your forums, to see what the user experience is like there. The forum I help look after started in 2008, so I'm guessing there would be a similar user experience if we had done what you have done (if we had similar levels of traffic to you).

It sounds like you have a great hosting provider there. I think I'm going to be locked down to my own hosting company for the next two and a half years (and I don't have the energy to try migrating to another server in the near future) but it looks like I'll have to make up a checklist of things to look for in a phpBB host.
I had a dedicated server for about 10 years which had a 320GB HDD. I just switched this year to a self-managed VPS from the same provider which was significantly cheaper, but has smaller storage (although it's SSD). Default storage is 30GB but being Windows Server 2016, that is quickly taken up, so I've added more. I'm still tweaking performance but pretty happy with it. With a database my size, shared hosting solutions are very limited so self-managed solutions provide better value (although require much more work from the admin).
Big Mac wrote: Sun Apr 08, 2018 3:35 pm
KYPREO wrote: Thu Mar 15, 2018 3:14 amThe risk and consequences of third party hosts taking down user's photos or holding them to ransom cannot be understated - this had catastrophic consequences for users on my board with 40 page topics full of images completely destroyed. Best to control the images yourself and encourage your users to use it.

The server load can be managed to a large degree through use of thumbnails & lightbox, limits limiting image attachment size and the numbers of attachments per post. You can also set locally hosted images to cache with very long expiry periods as well as compression.
We have got unlimited bandwidth, but it doesn't make sense to have pages grinding to a halt if a user puts a ton of massive pictures in a single topic. I'll have to try to find out how your thumbnails work.

What does the lightbox do? I thought that was just about having a black screen around an image? How does that cut down on server load? Do people have to click on thumbnails to surf over to a lightbox for each picture? (I see a "Thumbnails" option in the ACP, but not a "Lightbox" option. Is it an extension?)

I thought that image caching was just something that end-users had control over. Can image caching be set in the ACP? Or do I have to use something else (like .htaccess) to control image caching?
I don't actually use lightbox or thumbnails - I have the full image displayed and it hasn't been a problem. Lightbox is an extension. It will provide an exploded full size picture in any overlay (rather than in the browser tab) when you click on the thumbnail. This saves bandwidth/server load if images are hosted locally, because only the thumbnail is loaded until a user clicks on it.

As for image caching, this is set up server side in .htaccess (for Apache) or web.config (for IIS). I am only familiar with IIS. In that environment you can set output caching and content expiry times in HTTP response headers - the latter tells the client browser not to reload the content if it has already been loaded within a specified time period. There is lots of documentation out there describing how it works and how best to configure this and other performance options (static and dynamic compression). I have the files folder (where attachments are stored) set up with long file retention since image attachments are not really ever modified. If a user is constantly hitting the same page from the same device, the images should only ever loaded from the server the first time and not subsequent page loads (unless they hard refresh the page).
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Re: Recomendations on image hosting services

Post by 2600 »

I use the AWS extension and all attachments are uploaded to AWS. If you don't have tons and tons of pulls and gets and the storage is less than 5 GB, then you won't pay anything. Go above that and it will only be pennies a month. I have also used imgur on my other forum where I don't allow attachments and so far all of my pics have remained. Even after a few years.
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Re: Recomendations on image hosting services

Post by Wes of StarArmy »

John connor wrote: Fri May 04, 2018 3:23 am I use the AWS extension and all attachments are uploaded to AWS. If you don't have tons and tons of pulls and gets and the storage is less than 5 GB, then you won't pay anything. Go above that and it will only be pennies a month. I have also used imgur on my other forum where I don't allow attachments and so far all of my pics have remained. Even after a few years.
I second this, particularly if your forum is rather large. For a smaller to average forum self-hosting (using the normal attachment system) is normally fine. If you have a huge board you might also think about using a service to optimize image sizes.
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Re: Recomendations on image hosting services

Post by thecoalman »

Wes of StarArmy wrote: Fri May 11, 2018 3:30 pm If you have a huge board you might also think about using a service to optimize image sizes.
With plulupload phpBB will all ready do this. It resizes them client side before upload to whatever you have set the max dimensions. I also have had a custom mod gong back to to 2007 that will resize them server side, that only occurs now if the user does not have JS enabled .jpg has siding scale for compression usually labeled quality, On line 269 of /phpbb/plupload/plupload.php you'll find this:

Code: Select all

				'resize: {width: %d, height: %d, quality: 85, preserve_headers: false},',
Changing this will reduce file size,

Code: Select all

quality: 85
Note it also reduces the overall quality of the image. 85 is good number for the web, ou probably don't want to go below 75. You'll start to see artifacting around contrasting edges of color at 75. .jpg photos created cameras are set to preserve as much as possible so they are huge for .jpg standards. Reampling an image at 90% even without resizing it might cut the file size in half.

Note that preserve_headers: false is added by me, it will prevent issues with sideways thumbnails. It doesn't appear to work with pluplaod version 2.3.3 used by phpBB uses but I'm using 2.3.6 with no apparent issues.

There is not a lot you can do with other images without getting very involved. .png for example uses a lossless compression, you can shave off some file size with something like pngcrush but it needs to be installed on the server and you'd have to modify the script. I see so few of these images uploaded it's not worth the effort.
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