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.
I absolutely would not trust imgur… I wouldn’t trust anyone else with any of my data except as an encrypted offsite backup.
You do not need a beefy server either, you just need the storage space for it. And storage is relatively cheap. The only thing I would recommend is that if you are going to selfhost, that you realize you are responsible for your data; that means backups.
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
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.
edit: I’m an idiot and read it the wrong way sorry.
Consider IPFS, because then the “who” is hosting the images doesn’t matter as long as “someone” is.
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.
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.
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
