WHAT?? Upload an image to steemit, and it will be gone in a couple of months?
Uploading image links to steemit is a real problem that needs to be understood and corrected before it slaps us in the face.
The first time you use the #steemit editor, it can be quite confusing.
None of your images actually get uploaded to steemit. Instead, you must have your images remotely hosted on another webserver somewhere, and you can embed the image into your steemit post.
Sounds simple once you realize it... Go to google images and link to an image somewhere. Or better yet, use a free image hosting service and get it done. Simple and easy, right?
WRONG!
Possible problems we may encounter in the near future:
- Sites that remotely host images can change their terms of service, and refuse to link to steemit if a post becomes popular. Many of these remotely hosted image sites offer a free service by knowing that the bulk of the time, these "free" images are often low traffic, and not very popular. Should they consume too much bandwidth serving them for "free", the image service will refuse to serve that image for a period of time.
- Unauthorized linking to images and clip art, can yield copyright complaints. It can also have the image renamed or deleted from the website where you are linking to it. This can cause your steemit post to lose all of its images in a couple of months after it is discovered by the site owner.
- Historical posts on steemit may quickly lose their value if the content gets stripped of its images and remains with just plain text. Now the good news is that Steemit appears to be designed to be more of a "what's new".. like reddit, or twitter. Most of the time you won't be reading stale content several years from now. But keep this in mind. What if we want to archive this stuff for the future? Images are just as important.
Which brings us to these possible solutions:
- If you hope your posts become popular on steemit, *never* link to someone's website without their knowledge, permission. Even more importantly, that site owner needs to be prepared that in the event your steemit post goes viral, it can cause an avalanche of people downloading your steemit images all of a sudden. Both you, and the site owner, need to have a plan in place should the traffic for your images grow exponentially.
- We've now created a new consumer demand for hosting high traffic images. This could be a business opportunity that needs to be filled. Hello! Calling all technical entrepreneurs! Have any ideas?
There is an old saying that basically says, there is two ways to kill a business:
Quote: If you grow too slow, some competitor will eat your lunch for you
Grow too fast, and you can't meet consumer demand or give a poor customer experience.
We have a situation on the horizon that if steemit grows too fast, with the remotely hosted image situation is a problem that will need to be addressed sooner than later.
Quote: Imgur.com blocking steemit.com hotlinks to images
Source: https://steemit.com/steem/@dantheman/imgur
Please share your comments and concerns. Simply suggesting imgsafe.org or some other service is not the answer.
Steemit
The way STEEMIT handles uploading of images is not very well thought out, bordering on the purposefully inconvenient. Why are we ceding responsibility to third party apps that have no affiliation or reponsibility to STEEMIT? What's so complicated about a mechanism where we can upload images to STEEMIT directly so that they're kept on their proprietory servers and no one else's?
... quite simply, because if copyright images show up on steemit.com as the host, steemit.com (the domain owner) can get sued.
...that's why.
Wouldn't that apply to copyrighted linked images also? As the medium by which these images are displayed and disseminated to the public, they'd get hit either way wouldn't they?
Nope. The hoster that has it on their hard drive.. and broadcasts it, is the one that is given notice of the copyright violation.
Google has already been through this... Google (as money rich as they are) was hauled into court many times for the reason you just said:
"As the medium by which these images are displayed and disseminated to the public"
Google won their case, and set a precedent.
If they are simply linking to internet material, and not providing it... they are exempt.
I guess that explains STEEMIT's logic :-)
Upvoted you
My understanding is that Steemit is eventually going to allow us to upload images for our posts, via the editor, and they are going to be stored at IPFS: https://ipfs.pics/
I don't know if that is still accurate, or what the consequences will be, but at one time, I read that that was the plan.
All images will be uploaded to IPFS and/or cached by steemit unless they violate our terms of service or the law.
Will this become available for audio and video files?
So the idea is that the IPFS network (much like bittorrent) will have thousands of nodes that store and share files. We upload through steemit. Steemit shares it on IPFS until it has enough seeders. Then steemit can download the image "on the fly" from IPFS if it isn't cached locally.
This stops the user from having to care how it all works, because all they know is they clicked something to upload the image, and they can view a steemit page and render the image without even knowing about IPFS.
Sounds great. Except for, how stable is the current IPFS network under load? I bet you its a great concept that hasn't under gone stress testing in a real word scenario. This is fairly new technology that should be toyed with, but probably not implemented in a real world app, at least for the next 2 or 3 years until the IPFS network grows substantially.
In simple words: Won't work good yet. Need to wait much longer time. :)
Eventually sounds nice. IPFS = The InterPlanetary File System.
If possible I'd like to delay the July 4th launch, until these problems are eventually fixed.
As long as that linkable image is still in the editor, this is going to be a severe problem for all users. Worse yet, there is absolutely no help windows that pop up explaining these things. You have to be a google mastermind to search for these answers ahead of writing your first post.
We need to keep this issue alive until it is not only implemented, but tested and producing the results we need.
My solution to this is that I own a Synology Diskstation, otherwise commonly known as a NAS (Network-Attached Storage) device.
This device can act as a web server and appears on your desktop as an additional hard drive. The Synology contains pre-installed SSL encryption (instructions on generating the certificate are found on the web).
So to give the short answer. Store your photos on the Synology web folder and link to them from steemit. The only requirement to do this is that you need to have a "fixed IP Address" or also called "static IP address" from your internet provider. Some providers will only do this for you if you have a business internet account, but others will do it for a small monthly fee.
As a bonus the Synology also comes with all other kinds of benefits and features which you can check out on their site if interested. Also there are many models for every budget.
There are many tutorials on the Synology site that explain the setup process. https://www.synology.com/en-us/
And last but not least, Synology is not the only manufacturer of these devices, but they are my favorite due to ease of use and setup.
Great for the technically minded. Many members of my family on facebook and reddit won't have a clue nor the inspiration to try and learn any of this. Also static IP addresses are hard to come by with ipv4, so we're looking for another couple of years soley on the static IP problem.
How do we upload to Steemit.. I thought we could only post links to hosted images?
Correct. I was referring to "uploading image links". It didn't make it into the title, but it did in the first sentence. Plus people think in their minds they are actually uploading images into their posts..