Which free storage for many images? also to be used for thumbnails etc

Installation Hosting
1

Hi,

Is there a free storage service for many images?
Also to be used for thumbnails etc like for Topic List Previews plugin or to get the latest images from a topic and show it on homepage etc.

I haven’t forum on DigitalOcean.

Thank you in advance!
Deb

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2

There is not, sorry. It can be quite cheap, but it you have many images and are looking for free image hosting, you won’t find anything. :slight_smile:

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Backblaze has up to 10gb free, I think. I’m not sure about bandwidth though.

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Note that slow storage performance can be a major problem on Discourse instances historically. I guess as long as it’s only the images being stored there, but if it is really slow, I wonder…

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I’ve been looking into this recently as well. Hosting your images outside of your DigitalOcean droplet on another service can help increase your website load speed. I haven’t started researching the different image hosting services yet but I know a lot of people use Google’s or Amazon’s servers for hosting the images. I’m currently scoring C on the GTmetrix speed test, I wonder how much this would increase my speed.

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Thank you all for the answers. For now I am following the advice of @pfaffman, I’m using Backblaze with 10GB free, 10.000MB, if I upload each image of maximum 1MB I will have 10,000 topics.
In the future I will study something else or manually delete old images…

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Hi, sorry again. Is possible use this plan of AWS with 100GB free for always? :open_mouth: :open_mouth:

https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/?did=ft_card&trk=ft_card

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There is also Scaleway, 75GB free: Cloud, Compute, Storage and Network models and pricing - Scaleway it is safe?

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Despite the name, storage gateway is not an object storage product. It’s a caching application.

Scaleway works, per:

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Other idea:

  • I upload 10GB of images, for example, on my server (uploads folder of the forum)
  • Can I then upload/convert these 10GB of images from upload folder to server Cloud n.1 (for example BackBlaze)
  • Now images are only on Cloud n.1 right? I can delete images from my server
  • I have again free 10GB on my server
  • And so on with Cloud n.2 etc
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No, you can not.

You can move them to Cloud 1 without any issue and they will be removed from your server. But if you try to change to Cloud 2 you could break the URLs of the ones stored in Cloud 1.

Storage is as cheap as it gets now a day. You can get ~250GB for 5$ and those last a really really long mile. Using free services is not free and will cost you a lot on consistency and availability of the multimedia in the long term.

One of the things I love of Discourse is that all the media is stored locally, my site manages how-tos and community related photos. All the posts pre-Discourse are broken and most of them are never recoverable because of free storage options.

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