How does photo storage/hosting work in threads?

User Support
1

I have always hosted photos myself, one of these relics from early Internet-times when you got some storage space with your broadband subscription.

This has always worked well, at the old Aeroscale site it was a way of getting around the limited storage space available on-site and I was never caught up in the Photobucket-chaos a few years ago either.

Moving to the new Aeroscale site, initially the images appear to have been automatically uploaded to what appears to be some kind of on-site storage, like in the first post in this thread: My model colletion. This was just a cut-and-paste operation from the old site, bb-code and all, so I never actively uploaded the photos here. Checking the photo url:s they are obviously not from my own storage.

If we look in this thread, photos in postings up until April 2021 seem to be hosted on-site while anything posted later on seems to be just linked to my own hosting.

This really doesn’t matter to me but it seems like some has difficulty seeing the photos that I host myself in the threads here is an example where there has been some discussion about this.

Problem is that I always see my own pics no matter where they are hosted so I have no way of figuring out what could possibly be wrong. I know that it is possible to upload the pics explicitly to Aeroscale but I would prefer if it was done automatically (or linking to my own photo hosting worked) since I cross-post with a Swedish site (that uses BB codes and has no internal photo storage) and it makes life a lot easier cutting-and-pasting a finished post and just rewriting it in English (or my version of English at least :slight_smile: :grin: ) without going through the hassle of uploading the pics separately,

Was there some kind of changes made after April 2021 to how photos are handled (since I haven’t changed the way I post in any way while there is a distinct difference in where the photos are stored before and after this date)? And is there anything that can be done to allow anyone to see photos hosted off-site but linked using img-tagging?

:raising_hand_man:

Magnus

2

There was an automated change to this setting that I just discovered via the settings history. I think we had more than one backup at the time and the system ran out of hard drive space so it automatically switched off this feature. We have about 65GB of free space on the server now, and while I would like to switch this feature back on I need to do some homework as to what happens when I need to expand this storage limit. I already know there are several options available to me but I am unsure as to how they effect the existing file/photo storage schema. One option is to get remote S3 hosting of images separate from the main server. The other is to increase the size of the primary HD on a new instance for the entire server, and the other is to add another drive to the existing server. I need to figure out which of these options is best and of course what the additional cost per month is going to be.

This of course is a good time to mention how much I appreciate our Patreon supporters and our advertisers. Because all of this costs money. :slight_smile:

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@staff_Jim Thanks for your answer, I was mostly curious. On-site storage of photos produce a more lasting value for the site even if it of course comes at a cost. Many discussion boards no matter what subject has lost it’s visual content over the years (the same risk I run with my own storage, I suspect it only works because my ISP has forgotten about the servers, they can’t be any big part of their business nowadays…).

:raising_hand_man:

Magnus