Do you host peoples pictures or require them remote host?

jonsidneyb

Well-known member
I have been having people use things such as Photobucket.

I am thinking about letting people upload attachments when I get moved but it scares me a bit. I myself have many gigs of pictures on photobucket that I display.

How fast does attachments eat up your servers drive?

Just a little bit concerned that I might regret it if I allow people to upload pictures.
 
Depends on how much your members will use the feature. If you have a busy forum, it could end up being a few gigs worth of pictures in no time.
Just write up a tutorial on how to use photobucket and sticky it somewhere. :P
 
They have been using photobucket on my vB4 site. I was thinking about letting them upload when I get moved but I am thinking this is a bad idea.

My guys start tons of picture threads.
 
I might regret it if I allow people to upload pictures.
Depends on whether or not you want your forum to be an archive. Photo hosting sites come and go and people delete images, so if you want or need the images in your old threads to remain intact you have to train your users to make them attachments.

Attachments take up a lot of space and they make things like, oh, I don't know, migrating to a new forum software a pain in the ass, but if the photos are important parts of the threads you have to do it.
 
I allow members to upload pictures though in the past I used free hosting services, still do as I post all previews of my resources here using an image hosting service. I think this is down to a bad habit when xenforo has a nice attachment >> to image feature. Anyway, if your worried about using up so much disk space set a limit on the image sizes.

There are actually benefits to hosting on your own server and 3rd party services with both having their cons too. It's a juggling act, it's what better suits your needs and your members.
 
14,000 attachments > almost 7Gb imported from vbulletin with only a few worries and I've got about 70 something GB to fill before I start worrying about space issues. As long as your not on some crappy shared plan, drive space shouldnt be an issue.

Bandwidth, now that's another story. But I host video too.
 
I will have to think on this really hard. Just one of my own albums has 2500 photos on it and I have 40 albums. I have several a large number of threads devoted to pictures but since they are hosted off of my site I have no clue how many gigs it is.

Will think on it.
 
If that's the case then this is really a no-brainer. There's nothing worse than someone bumping an old thread where people are talking about images that aren't there anymore.

We are one of those odd ball sites that we encourage old threads resurfacing.

I wish there was a way to estimate what the total size of all the offsite hosted pictures are. I doubt there is any practical means of doing that.
 
They can use the attachment feature, or properly use the img bbcode.
I dont' see a problem with either. If it's spam they get banned. And if the remote img no longer works we ask them to fix it - if the request is ignored their post is deleted.
 
I need to do some learning I think.

If lets say a couple of years down the road pictures really get out of hand would I want to get the picture archive on another drive? Since I have no idea what I will be getting into I want to be safe.

In this small subforum with somewhat short threads, is 1017 threads devoted to pictures.

http://edcforums.com/forumdisplay.php/87-Show-us-pics-of-your-EDC!

Outside of that subforum I have a 1664 post show us a picture of your keychain thread.

http://edcforums.com/showthread.php/36092-Keychain-Pics

I have a 3302 post show a picture of your Atwood tool thread.

http://edcforums.com/showthread.php/40393-The-Official-Atwood-collectors-thread.

I have a 2444 post show us your pocket knife thread.

http://edcforums.com/showthread.php/39500-Show-us-your-Sharps!/page245

A 1249 post show us a picture of your backpack thread.

http://edcforums.com/showthread.php/37206-Pics-Of-your-edc-Bag!

I probably have at least 30 super picture threads.

All the picture threads do not come close to comparing to the actual numbers of pictures as we are a picture heavy group.

I know just starting out we will not have any problems. Just wondering what will happen over time and if something can be done about it in the future if it gets out of hand.
 
We limit picture attachments to... 125kb? Pretty small. Larger pics are automatically re-sized. You could do the math but we have 6k attachments which take up about 0.7GB. We will quite probably make the attachments more generous when we switch.

Last time I tested xf they had the same system.
 
I don't know which is best.
That reminds me. I am storing attachments in a directory, not mySQL
I don't know how to tell how much diskspace my attachments are using.
 
Ok.....

When I start to do this live I will get it to resize the pictures and follow what ever advice I can get. It is one of those things where I am not worried what happens now but what happens years down the road, I just want to plan for it if possible.
 
Disk space keeps getting cheaper and cheaper. I encourage my members to upload photos to the forum as loading times will be much faster than remote loading of images. My largest forum has close to 6 gigs of attachments.
 
Disk space keeps getting cheaper and cheaper. I encourage my members to upload photos to the forum as loading times will be much faster than remote loading of images. My largest forum has close to 6 gigs of attachments.

How big is the forum itself?
 
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