this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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Fedigrow

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Alright, so what is the current recommended way to share pictures on Lemmy? (feddit.org)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by Blaze@feddit.org to c/fedigrow@lemm.ee
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Hello everyone,

Following this post, it seems that quite a few users can't see catbox.moe pictures.

Catbox was my preferred option as they have a handy Firefox extension that allows to upload pictures with just a click, and get the link directly in the clipboard.

My understanding was also that by having the pictures on catbox, we avoided storing copies of pictures on every Lemmy instance. Is this still the case? I read a bit about proxying pictures (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4035) and it seems like this is more related to keep all media required by an instance locally, to avoid broken links.

So long story short: what should be the recommended way to share pictures on Lemmy?

  1. Use a hoster like https://imgbb.com/
  2. Upload pictures locally
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[โ€“] ticoombs@reddthat.com 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Lemmy is still saving thumbnails and (previously) sometimes the whole image! The majority of image issues have been cleared up in my opinion and it works very well. Nearly all of our hosts allow hotlinking as it's basically required for our use cases.

Lemmy also knows when the image is another Lemmy instance (through "magic", or just cross posting). So if you upload once and then use that same link on all other posts then that would still be the same.

The problem I think you have is your usecase also includes posting externally to Lemmy. & to some extent, you don't want those images tied to your Lemmy account. If my users post via my instance then they are welcome to also hotlink the images externally. This is only possible because Reddthat uses a CDN and caches the images as much as possible.

Even if we didn't use a cdn there are plenty of VPS' and proxy software that we could use which would transparently function in the same way. You could even setup your own VPS, some image hosting software like https://chibisafe.moe/ or https://github.com/nokonoko/Uguu or https://github.com/hauxir/imgpush

To sum up:

  • post once to Lemmy instance and then use that image everywhere
  • use a random image host that allows hotlinking to do the same
  • get your own VPS, setup an image upload and use that (and maybe get a domain too!)

The 3rd option you can do completely anonymously via crypto.

[โ€“] Blaze@feddit.org 3 points 2 days ago

Thank you for the detailed answer!