Host external pictures

[NightAngel]

Hello,

Excuse me in advance if my post isn't in the right forum.

I think it would be interesting to propose an feature for automatically retrieve external images.

Indeed when a member uses the img tags, images are usually hosted elsewhere ... logic! This isn't an immediate problem, but often members use external services free. After several days / weeks / months / years, the images no longer exist and sustainability issues arise... lasting quality.

I must admit that because of the missing media, many old discussions lapsed.

In my opinion this is a real problem especially since the primary interest of a forum is the richness of its content which should not be altered over the years.

Forgive me if my words are not very clear, but English is not my native language.

Good day.

[Misi]

I think it would be interesting to propose an feature for automatically retrieve external images.

Indeed when a member uses the img tags, images are usually hosted elsewhere ... logic! This isn't an immediate problem, but often members use external services free. After several days / weeks / months / years, the images no longer exist and sustainability issues arise... lasting quality.

Automatically include them on your server so they would not disappear?

That would need a huge space on your server(s).

[NightAngel]

Thank you for your reply.

I think that this feature should be enable/disable by forum : no interest into forums such as "various topics", etc.

I have a community of about 4,000 members, 5000 visits/day, 500 connected/days et I have immediately 4Tb of storage (quickly expandable to 32TB).

It was just a proposal :)

[Feld0]

Automatically include them on your server so they would not disappear?

That would need a huge space on your server(s).

It uses a lot of storage, but from personal experience, I think it's well worth it. If you're running a large site with loads of activity, you're probably on dedicated hardware anyway, for which storage is pretty cheap. :)

I'd love to see this in the core, but considering the server requirements it comes with, it might qualify as a "niche" feature. That said, forums are all about content, and images are a huge part of that. One might as well say that attachments are "niche" because free file hosting services exist that someone could easily link to instead, but attachments last as long as the forum does.

[Michael]

There's an old mod that did this, could probably be upgraded if people want this again:

http://invisionmodding.com/files/file/828-ah23task-download-remote-images/

[Saiga]

Automatically include them on your server so they would not disappear?

That would need a huge space on your server(s).

Maybe so, but it's worth it.

This suggestion has come up so many times, but IPS has already announced how images will be handled in 4.0 and this feature wasn't mentioned at all so I doubt it'll make it through.

[Saiga]

I'm not really making this as a suggestion to IPS, rather I'm trying to see what others think of this kind of solution.

http://ckeditor.com/addon/image-embed

Having embedded images data encoded? Thoughts?

[maddog107_merged]

*cough* http://community.invisionpower.com/resources/projects/_/show-one-post-per-page-image-download-r87 *cough*

I also posted my job on Elance, it got more responses there, its going to cost me about $1,000 to do it, but once its done I will release the code to everyone. They say 50 hours, so 2 weeks or so.

I have 500gb images uploaded to my website, im guessing after downloading all the external ones ill have a lot more (probably 10x the number). We shall see.