Avistella damn didn't know Catbox isn't a viable image host. :/ I just started using it today. I'll probably try file garden and postimage when I wake up tomorrow, since they sound like the best ways to host media out there.
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.
Agh crap i thought it was only for links not for images :( thats like half of my entire th profile interface . If this actually ends up being true then thatll suck big time.
Also sucks since most, if not all the decent alternatives i know of either have a storage/size limit or require you to pay. Ill try some of the alternatives suggested
this is literally such a painnn
at the least ive had good experiences with filegarden for my personal site, so ig i gotta use that one for toyhouse now too 😭
Does this count for users who only post their images on a server, but don't copy the link to post the image elsewhere?
I only use my discord server so I can access and look at images from all my platforms when I log into discord
BIRD : If you're just file hosting (ex. uploading images and/ or audio to use in profile codes, forum posts, etc.) and not file storing, I think the free storage space provided will suffice for the most part. But if you plan on storing files (like backups), yeah, the alternatives really do suck. :/ For backing up my character images/ stories/ codes, I personally use Mega which has 20GB available compared to Google Drive's 15GB, though File Garden does seem promising, since it doesn't have a storage limit that I've seen so far.
SherbetToons Toyhouse hasn't greyed out most of my images. In fact, I'd say they're the same or pretty close to the original. So, I don't think they do that to save space, assuming the greying is desaturation. Personally, I only seen my image appear desaturated/greyed out on Toyhouse if the image was set to a color profile that's not sRGB before drawing. Though, some users say they've experienced stanger things with Toyhouse, and it could be a bigger problem for traditional drawings. Here are a couple threads that talk about the issue (thread 1 and thread 2).
As far as the image hosting goes, I've used imgbb. It's decent, though the site has experienced unnanounced outages before. If I remember, one of them made me have no access to images I saved for a day, though the other ones were shorter.
ASTRAIOS it only applies to links outside discord, if you're only viewing them within discord you should be fine
Sky_BlueberryBlitz As a guy who's operated servers for half his life, I have theories on what could be happening there.
Either it's a color space issue, like you said, or the image handling software on TH's server having a bit of a conniption over the image data. Most web apps employ something like GD or imagick to convert all uploaded images into a compressed, web-safe format (usually PNG, but Twitter converts larger files to a pretty awful JPEG preset), and, more importantly, generate thumbnails and alternate sizes, which runs in the background after you upload. These packages have to be blazing fast to handle demand on sites like these, so sometimes some information gets ignored or otherwise messed with.
NebulonRanger Yeah, I'm not exactly sure what the reason is, but what you said about the image handling software makes sense too.
i’ve been using revoltchat which is a clone of discord for hosting audio files, and imgbox for images
Damn, I've been using discord for it, I'll have to fix all my images to be from somewhere else, thank you for making this thread!!
How would one go about trying to upload audio files? Most of my ones through code are hosted through youtube but certain ones have files hosted from discord.
Also, just checking, any images directly uploaded to toyhouse should be fine, right? It's just stuff in codes/profiles/display or should I worry about trying to rehost those somewhere else as well?
bugbait : If you don't mind making an account, I would recommend File Garden for hosting audio files. It's very straightforward: just upload your audio file then click the icon to get the link to the direct audio.
And yes, images uploaded on TH itself are perfectly fine. It's Discord that's making these changes, so any image links using Discord are affected, but TH itself isn't changing, so any on-site TH links (like art of your character you uploaded to their TH gallery) are fine to keep as is.