We want to provide an image hosting service.

This document serves as our proposal for how image hosting ought to function and details about the technical implementation.

images as a service #

It's an image hosting service. Users will be able to upload their images and it will be publicly sharable, including hotlinking. Further we will support an image manipulation API which will be awesome for quick tweaks to width and height ratio, quality, rotation, etc. The intention is to store the images permanently until service is canceled.

Based on previous research, and in order to stay competitive with other image hosting services, we would need similar features:

• Permanent storage
• Public only
  • No private images allowed
• Hotlinking enabled
• Ad free
• Nominal storage
  • We should limit the storage per user

the twist #

scp, rsync, sftp to upload images. All content management happens inside the terminal and with a key pair. Our target audience are people that are comfortable with the terminal.

The default route to the image would be optimized for the device requesting to view the image. We would read the User-Agent to try to understand the device and then change the quality and resolution based on that information.

We would also provide ways to specify:

• width
• height
• preserve aspect ratio
• quality
• original image

We would also seamlessly integrate with any of the services we create that could benefit from sharing images.

This service would be all about sharing media with other people, that's why it's public only. We don't want to be a data warehouse for all personal media.

why? #

We think this service would be genuinely useful to terminal enthusiasts who want to quickly take a pic and share it in chat or use it in a blog.

moderation #

This is not a "post whatever image you want without repercussions" image hosting service. We will accept DMCA take down notices and we will ban users for posting illegal images. In particular we have a Code of Content Publication that we must maintain.

Moderation is going to be the biggest time sink with this service so we need a system in place to make it painless. In the beginning, I think we should have an RSS feed of all images posted to imgs and review them. If there is an image posted that we deem inappropriate, we will remove the image and potentially ban the user who published it.

We should also provide a reporting endpoint so users can report images for us to review.

technical details #

Uploading an image would use file uploads and we would store the image inside the posts table.

Then we would build out a web api for retrieving the images.

For image manipulation, we can use imgproxy.

where do we host the files? #

We could store the files to S3 or some other object storage, but the costs are pretty high. We could store the files directly on our VM FS, but we'd need to make sure we have enough space and it can scale. We decided to self-host a minio instance for our object storage service.

integration with pico services #

The entire point of this service is to enhance our pico services with image hosting capabilities, so it's critical we figure out the ergonomics of integration this service with pico.

So when you upload an image to prose or pages, we use the same functionality for storing and manipulating images.