what does it mean to host an image /gen
Edit: THE END TIMES ARE HERE!!! FIND A FILE HOST NOW!!!
Discord has officially put this change in place. As of 2/23/24, files hosted on discord will not be accessible outside of discord. I personally reccomend postimage for images and filegarden for audio, more details below.
IMPORTANT: i've been seeing a lot of comments about how this is a bad decision on discord's part. While discord DOES make a lot of bad decisions, THIS ISN'T ONE OF THEM - while using discord as a file host for external websites was convenient, it was also abuse of their server space. Discord is a chat client with infrastructure made to bear the weight of messaging. It does not have the server capacity to act as a media host. Media hosting for other sites (the only thing this change impacts) is very resource-heavy, and not all services are equipped to bear that load. This change was put in place to prevent discord's finite server space from being misused, and this is something that websites have been doing in various ways since the 2000s for the same reason. PLEASE USE DESIGNATED SERVICES FOR YOUR FILES, "WELL IT WORKS FOR NOW" WILL ONLY HURT YOU LATER
- love, your friendly neighborhood netizen
anyway back to your regularly scheduled post, reorganized because this has happened now. sorry if it's a mess
more info in this tumblr post, i decided to share it here because i use discord for the audio files i use in my codes :( essentially, links to things hosted on discord will expire shortly after the link is made, so you won't be able to use links to discord messages (including images or text files) permanently outside of discord.
Now is a great time to find actual image/file hosting places because discord uhhhh was never for that anyway. I'll be working on ways to use audio files hosted on other storage sites so when the change goes out i can help people with my codes. There's a list of hosting sites in the tumblr post, I personally use imgur for most of my stuff! < don't do this. see update below
i might also repost this/a link to the thread here in service reviews bc i know a lot of people use discord to host proof screenshots 😬
Avistella has provided a nice selection of alternatives in this comment, and theglitzyhive has a bulletin here with his own list of alternatives and some offline content preservation tips you may find useful. please check out these resources!
moif made this tool that provides a discord-like interface for accessing files on your google drive like you've been doing on discord! Thank you so much for making this!
Thanks to ferdie for mentioning that the images themselves aren't lost! You can paste the image url back into discord, and it'll still work, so you can save them from there and reupload them somewhere else! THIS HAS BEEN CONFIRMED TO WORK BY OTHER USERS - HANG ONTO YOUR LINKS!
some clarifications for people reading this thread, who aren't that well versed in how image hosting works!
Will this effect images in your servers? No. The ONLY thing this will effect is links from other websites outside of discord to media in discord messages. Nothing in your servers or messages is getting deleted. We don't have enough information to know how this will effect things between servers, though, so I can't speak on that.
What is an image host? For people on the internet to see an image from your computer, it has to be hosted somewhere on the internet with a permanent web address, and whenever someone loads a web page with that image on it, the page on their screen has to be able to read that web address to retrieve the image from your host and display it. Most sites can host the images used on their own pages without issue, for example, toyhouse hosting the images in your characters' galleries and user avatars. For things beyond the scope of what the site allows their servers to store, an image hosting service outside the site is needed - for example, the images used in peoples' user layouts and character codes.
What is hotlinking? Hotlinking is when you take a link to an image hosted on someone else's server and use that link to serve the image on your website. For example, if I uploaded a picture to my own website on my own server, and you copied the same link to it on my server for your own website. Hotlinking from sites that don't have the server space for it is bad! Because you have to get the image from its host every single time someone loads the page it's on, hotlinking to a server that was meant for one website will put multiple websites' worth of strain on the server. This was a cardinal sin in the 2000s, but they don't teach this stuff anymore.
"ALTERNATIVES" THAT ARE NOT ALTERNATIVES: Imgur and neocities!!! I keep seeing people suggest imgur as neocities for hotlinking purposes. Imgur's TOS forbids doing this (and they make it super hard to do anyway) and they'll ban you from the site if they find out. Neocities blocks hotlinking entirely, which is what discord has chosen to do. THEY WILL HOST YOUR IMAGES, BUT YOU CAN'T HOTLINK TO THEM ON YOUR SITES.
Ronde-Maulde hosting an image means to post it on the Internet in a place where other people can access it on their own computer. Unless it's hosted somewhere, the image basically doesn't exist to anyone not using the device it was made or saved on, so It has to be uploaded somewhere permanent online (like a hosting site meant for storing images) for people to see it, link to it and use it on their own sites.
can i still upload images from my gallery????? i kninda need too cause i own an art/oc server SOBS and i post a bunch of funny pictures
cuz im not sure i understand SOBS
Ronde-Maulde you can still post images ON discord, you just can't link to those images on websites outside discord permanently anymore
i personally have a private character to upload images to and use those toyhouse image links instead. works perfectly no matter the privacy of said character. idk if its against the rules, but all images ive used were created by me so i think its fine
if it turns out to be true (saying IF because the op of the tumblr post likerally says "the source is me, its not public yet" so Im taking it with a huge grain of salt for now) It's a mega bummer. Just like atempause I make a wholeass server for myself to put my codding files in (especially audios that i cant upload to a 'prive TH character') and it suck ballz. File hosting was legit the only way i used discord u_u I mean I should know better than to use an app for anything but its intended use.
GGGRRRAAHHHHHHH IM HOSTING LIKE ALMOST EVERY IMAGE ON ALL MY PROFILES AND ALL MY CODES ON DISCORD....... it's fiiiiine if i have to move stuff over to drive (the tool Avistella shared is a lifesaver, i've been looking for a way to do that for forever!!), it'll prolly help me be more organized about shit anyway, but damn if i won't miss the convenience of being able to just ctrl+shift+s, ctrl+c, and ctrl+v into discord to quickly share screenshots. now i gotta SAVE shit to my puter and UPLOAD it into gdrive and remember to DELETE it later when my storage inevitably gets full. hate it here
Gec3V i don't see why they wouldn't implement it, they're already setting up the means to do it. It's for the exact reason why, in the 2000s, "hotlinking" (linking to an image resource directly instead of reposting it to your own server to use on your website) was a web sin. People using a chat client as an image hosting site is using its servers for things that it wasn't made or prepared for, and at the end of the day, discord is a chat client. Image hosting servers need a lot more space for a lot more data, especially with how many more people are using them now than in the 2000s.
You're gonna have to find another way to host your images, the tumblr post i linked has alternatives and people in the thread have their own ways of hosting their content.
D': i dont know what to say to this!! i'll look at the post for alternatives as you said. thanks for the heads up!
StormyStarlight you can actually ctrl+c ctrl+v images into imgur from art programs/snip tools! there's some flaws to imgur that really bug me, but that's the one I use because I have huge collections of pixels on there. It works fine for me as long as I use the legacy layout, which it gives you the option to use.
