So after 2 months of hosting my blog post images at Google Drive as I mentioned in my post "Starting afresh... Again", I am now back to hosting them on Imgur again :D
To keep this post interesting for everyone, let me be as brief and specific as I can.
If you want to put images on your blog post, you need to host your images somewhere. As of today, the default is your Google Photos account. However, back then in the year 2004, there was no such thing as that, and so we had to host our blog images on a third-party website.
I was using Photobucket to host my blog images, even becoming a premium member to handle more bandwidth usage, paying $9.99 per month. We had a great relationship for 14 years but in 2017, they suddenly got greedy and increased the annual premium membership fee to $399.99. Anyone not paying that ridiculous amount could no longer host images.
I couldn't afford that, especially since I had deactivated all ads on my blog and was no longer earning anything from my writing. I wanted to give my readers a great and seamless experience of no ad interruptions when they read my posts (which was kinda ironic since my entire career had been in the advertisement industry). And so it was time to say goodbye to Photobucket.
I moved to AWS to host my blog images. That went well for some time. At AWS, I was charged based on monthly bandwidth usage. On a normal month when I had average traffic, my monthly bill would be around $3, but if I had a couple of "hit" posts in that month, my bill would jump to $10. I was kinda okay with that, but then one of my posts in 2020 during CoVid went super viral and I ended up with a humongous monthly bill of $100. Holy hellll.
I moved out of AWS immediately.
I then started using Imgur, the world's number one image-sharing website to host my blog images. I love Imgur. It's practically free, and I faced absolutely no issues with it for 3 years.
However, considering it is a private company that was also recently acquired, who knows, it could go the Photobucket way suddenly one fine day and screw me all over again. And so I thought, if a Corporation is going to screw me again, might as well be a Corporation that is already screwing me, naw? Kinda makes sense, in a dystopian way.
I was already paying Google an annual fee of ₹1,300 for the additional 100GB, why not make use of that? And so 2 months ago, I decided to move to Google to host my blog images.
But then comes the question. Where in Google exactly? There is Google Photos, and there is Google Drive. Now let me give you a very quick info and differences about these two products.
Google Photos is the default location where you can upload your blog images. It is also where all your phone pics get backed up. It is the ideal place to store and share your images.
HOWEVER, there is a small issue for me here. Google Photos does not allow you to create sub-folders. Meaning, you cannot create folders within a folder. So that means I have to dump all my blog images into one big folder, creating chaos and mayhem in the long run when I have 100+ more blog posts.
Google Drive, on the other hand, allows you to create sub-folders. Yayyy. I can neatly put the images of each blog post into their individual folders, creating order and sanity once again.
HOWEVER, you cannot directly embed your images from Google Drive. Aaarrgh. Labnol has a very nice solution, where you can insert the link of your Google Drive image and generate an embed-able link! Yayyy again.
That was working really well for me.
Yeah of course I had to go through additional multiple steps to generate the links, and this became quite an arduous task especially if my particular blog post happens to be image-heavy. But the effort of being organised is going to be worth it in the long run.
I finally found my match.
So why am I going back to Imgur now?
Because after using this method for 2 months, I just found out that images on my recent blog posts were starting to disappear!
It was then that I found out the embed-able links generated EXPIRE! Yup. They freaking expire. They have an expiry date! So no matter how organised my image folders are on Google Drive, it doesn't actually matter because the links are not permanent! Aaaargghh.
That is why, with my head held down and my tail between my legs, I will continue using Imgur to host all my blog images again.
Sure, there will come a day when they will suddenly change their business model and hike up the charge. I will be ready for that and try not to be very disappointed about it anymore. But until that day comes, cheers everyone, here's to Imgur and hope I continue entertaining you with my blog updates.
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