What Happened To Images?

Today I needed to reference an old Steemit post from two years ago. I was going through my posts page by page since the search function doesn't work that well on Steemit. I noticed that the images were all looking a bit too small in the posts.

I'm someone who cares a lot about the look of a post, particularly where the photos appear, what size and quality they are and all that. It looks as though the images have not only been seriously compressed, but also reduced in size. Could that be? Is there anyone reading this that knows for sure?

I think it would be a shame to ruin old posts, just because they're old. Steemit has a lot of SEO juice, so many of these posts are still being ranked by Google. A lot of How To style posts that I've found useful over the years were written on Steemit. It would be a shame to need one of those in the future only to find that the images are gone, don't look right or whatever.

---

The obvious solution

I was talking about this with someone the other day, and the solution dawned on us; to host our own images. God knows, I've been paying for domain names and underused server spaces for many years now. Why not host my own images? That way, nobody can compress them, remove them or mess with them in any other way.

LOL. Did you actually think I'd post without a coffee photo?

Hosting one's own images also makes websites and blogs easier to migrate since the images are represented by URLs only. Another benefit would be the ability to change the images without having to update the posts! If I wanted to change the photo used in this post after the fact; especially after the 7 day window after which Steemit posts can no longer be edited, I could simply change the source photo and keep the same name/URL.

A lot of your are now wondering why I'm not talking about the free image hosts out there. Truth be told, I don't trust any of them anymore. I had and incident with Flickr back in the day when new management came in and just blocked a whole bunch of our videos while trying to force us unto the paid model. Just like in crypto, not your URLs, not your images.

Going forward, this is an option I will seriously be looking at. I have the server space, so why not?