So-- I would love nothing better than to host every image on Imgur and call it a day, except that Imgur is just *lol* with that business. I.e., in some cases, I have stuff that's been there for ~10yrs with no issue, and then there's a bunch of other stuff that routinely gets deleted after 3-4mos or so.
Not trying to ramble here, but my concern is that I don't want to weigh down our host, and instead want to find the 'right pocket,' i.e. a good-size image file that let's me show off our image content, but isn't a burden upon our host.
Plus of course, sometimes showing off a certain series requires ~10 images or so, meaning the image-serving requirements are 10x the nominal requirement.
In cases like that, I have no problem uploading such content to Imgur, even if it's not going to last long, but... I kinda want to figure out how I should handle these things, if that makes sense...
Thank you for any and all advice.
I convert images to the WEBP format, and often also resize them at 75% and compress them at 75% quality.
Even just resaving a JPG or PNG as WEBP can result in an impressive file size reduction. E.g. a movie screenshot in PNG format at 438.5kb, saved as a Webp at just 10.0kb! With little noticeable difference in image quality.
I try not to post anything over 100kb, and will even convert to WEBP any images in JPG or PNG under 100kb, to save hosts every possible kb.
The Lemmy front end Tesseract does this function (convert to Webp, compress to 75% quality) automatically for you. Could be good if PieFed did the same.
(I also have a Pixelfed account where I sometimes post images I'll use in PieFed, but that's only because PieFed currently doesn't allow multiple image uploads or uploading in comments. In fact, I often go back to Lemmy when I want to do that kind of thing, e.g. movie posts like this https://lemmy.ca/post/46999890 )