RE: ATT: STEEMIT COMMUNITY If You Are Using A Free Image Hosting Site To Upload Your Photos:: What happens if the site shuts down?
I think the issue as to whether or not steemit.com copies the post images and stores them on its centralized image-hosting servers is important for us to get clarified. Because then, at least there is less chance of trouble. That assumes steemit.com sensibly backs up all images on their servers.
Of course having the images safely persisted on the Steem blockchain would be ideal, but apparently that's a difficult scaling problem that is being addressed by potential solutions on several fronts.
I've been using imgsafe.org and/or postimage.com, and using their direct links in my posts. What I can see is that the links to my images get changed after submitting the post.
For example, for this recent post of mine: Busy Beavers at the D&R Canal:
This is the link I put for the first image when creating the post: https://i.imgsafe.org/b7e2d2e779.png
And this is the link Steemit created after the post goes live:
https://img1.steemit.com/0x0/https://i.imgsafe.org/b7e2d2e779.png / https://img1.steemit.com/0x0/https://i.imgsafe.org/b7e2d2e779.png
So, in that final image link, does the img1.steemit.com part of the URL show that steemit.com is indeed copying and storing the images on its servers? Or is it just a proxy through to the original image hosting site that I used?
@timcliff said this in the comments: "To clarify too though - there is the Steem blockchain, and there are the Steemit servers. The Steem blockchain is the decentralized network where all of the posts/votes/etc. are stored. The Steemit.com servers are hosted by Steemit, Inc. Steemit, Inc does store a local copy of the images - so if your third party hosting site goes down, the images for the posts should still load, but Steemit, Inc can be censored - so images stored there are not as "safe" as what is on the blockchain."
Also, did you see the comments by craig-grant? While I still would like to see a more fluid system with safeties in place, I know there are so many issues the administrators have to work out. Craig gave us a link to a much more secure form of uploading, the creator of this image hosting site is on steemit, here's his original post: https://steemit.com/dirtyimg/@blueorgy/dirtyimg-steemit-temporary-image-hosting-solution-utilizing-steemit-image-caching