Firstly, I want to thank all the individuals who helped me out here.
I created a website: picinfinity.co. The purpose of the site is to keep your images alive and on the interwebs forever.
Oh great, another image host
Not exactly. Picinfinity doesn't actually host any of the images you upload. Instead it ensures that your images are always hosted on any one of a number of image hosts around the internets. If a host goes down (which happens all the time) your image will be safe. Once you upload an image you will get a "Direct Link" which, when accessed, will redirect to a working link on an actual image host. This way, my site does all the work to ensure that your image stays alive, and all you have to do is use the direct link.
Here's an example using the direct link: http://picinfinity.co/d/3967fb7c-1de9-428d-a708-56d1a84e5da8.jpg
At the moment, all direct links end with .jpg (because I'm being lazy), but if you uploaded a .gif for example you'll still be redirected to a link ending in .gif. Example: here's a gif: http://picinfinity.co/d/326219b5-69f2-485e-9525-01f476aa8e7a.jpg
You'll notice the site isn't pretty, but who cares? There's no styling for the direct image links, which is the main purpose of image hosts in the first place.
Why no styling? Because I'm not a web developer. I had a nifty idea so I threw this site together. If you'd like to edit the css and give me a better version I would be more than happy to implement it in the site (while we're on the subject, if you wrote up a stylesheet that scales nicely for mobile devices that would be sweet).
TL;DR: Picinfinity uploads your image to any one of a number of free image hosts and ensures that the image never dies (by keeping redundant backups on other image hosts). You get a dedicated link which will redirected you directly to a working image host every time.
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tippyc ago
This will work great for a year until your trial runs out on your web hosting service, or until you mysteriously disappear after hosting right-wing material. We've had users and even the creator of Voat try this in the past and it's always the same result: thousands of submissions worth of content gets lost.
picman ago
Always a risk. Few things to consider:
I don't have a "trial" on my web hosting service because it's running on a dedicated server I've owned for awhile now.
The site doesn't take much to run. I built it to offload most of the big bandwidth work on the other hosts. The most bandwidth intensive action the site takes is the initial upload. After that, the rest is handled by the image hosts.
No files are actually stored on my site. I know this doesn't mitigate all "legal" implications, but it helps.
Not to say I'm invincible, but I've put a great deal of time into planning this site to ensure it's scale-ability without costing me much.
Also, if anything goes bad I can always dump the database online so everyone can get the links to their images. As long as they have the direct link provided by picinfinity, they could query the database to find the links to all the hosts their image is hosted on.
But, alas, as with anything, there are no guarantees.
prairie ago
At least it's easier for someone to pick up the torch of a redirection site rather than a full host site, and that does make it less-susceptible to takedown or becoming too costly to afford the bandwidth of.
tippyc ago
Interesting, seems like a cool idea. Do the picinfinity links still work if the main host is lost? Or is the idea just upload it everywhere and have your server go down the list until it finds a good redirect?
picman ago
Sort of. If a link goes down or a link otherwise dies, it will be deleted from the database and reuploaded to a working host.
So, it does go down the list of links, but the list never gets very long. That what you mean?
tippyc ago
Yes, exactly what I mean.