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Comment by jacooper | Hacker News Reader

You know you are in HN when people use S3 to upload photos, and not imgur.

If you’ve already got a bucket ready to roll for this sort of thing, S3 is cheap, straightforward, with a stable interface and API, ownership over your assets, and a much lower chance your content will end up placed on-page and strongly associated with stuff that isn’t yours.

Higher chance they'll get hotlinked somewhere and you'll get a huge bill, however.

Free beats cheap. Imgur and its comeptitors are also straightforward. You don't really need an API for a single upload. The ownership and control argument is great in theory, but this is now an image on the internet. Anyone can link to it which will cost you money. Anyone can download it and upload to somewhere else. That means all appearances of control are artificial. I don't see much benefit here.

> You don't really need an API for a single upload.

Au contraire, what I “didn’t really need” was an entire image processing and sharing platform run for someone else’s benefit. That image sharing platform is itself primarily accessed via the use of a grossly overweight multiple-API client called a “web browser”.

No, what I want is a programmatic interface with multiple language bindings and a command line tool, so I don’t even have to leave the terminal. When I share an image, my preferred service for this is a bucket.

>what I “didn’t really need” was an entire image processing and sharing platform run for someone else’s benefit.

Do you think AWS is run as a public service? If you aren't hosting it on your own hardware, someone else is benefiting.

>That image sharing platform is itself only accessible via the use of a grossly overweight multiple-API client called a “web browser”.

The web browser that you are using to post this comment?

It takes two clicks of the mouse to upload something to Imgur. Maybe you have built an S3 workflow that is nearly as seamless, but it would be tough to beat Imgur for simplicity.

I got no problem if anyone prefers to upload images like this. People have their own preferences and I can't argue with "I prefer to stay in the terminal". However "I like this better" is a different statement than "this is better" and the comment I replied to was closer to the latter.

hard to imagine someone stooping to this level of antagonistic misrepresentation because they disagreed with someone else’s preference for image hosting, but there it is.

“two clicks of a mouse” - that’s a negative, not a positive, attribute. I’d rather not use a mouse, when possible. And yes, my S3 “workflow” is a very short shell script.

are you actually interested in which user agent I use to access HN, or was that just a snide assumption? I mean, sure, sometimes it is, but it’s ableist arrogance to assume everyone’s using a fat graphical client. Folks really don’t always use a web browser, or touch a mouse, to interact with websites.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

Please especially avoid tit-for-tat spats, which are especially boring and tedious.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Cloudfront makes S3 effectively free for hobby applications. That’s what I use for my self hosted version of Imgur.

I truly don’t understand downvotes here. Imgur’s fine; S3’s fine; different people have different use cases. How is that contentious?

Because some folks can’t distinguish between contextual value judgements based on their own preferences, and a universal absolute.

It becomes a discussion of engineering decisions

Downvotes are not for disagreement, they are for demoting off-topic or otherwise unhelpful conversational threads.

This is incorrect.

This is uninformative.

S3... Harder to use... Gotta pay egress....

It seems worse all round.

On top of that, Imgur automatically deletes EXIF data, which would've prevented GGP from leaking their home address.

I am not a machine.

I'm not a cat.

oh ya rookie move - stripped that and wiped my CF cache

This touches a semi-related nerve. When you share a photo on iOS there’s an option to remove exif data—or at least the photo’s location—but there’s no way to always have it removed by default. Really annoying and easy to forget. /rant

I think the default is to remove everything. I like to archive nice photos and because of that always have to ask family members to resend the image with metadata enabled.

I’ll have to investigate that somehow, whenever I open the share panel the location option is enabled.

I think that you can at least choose for photos you take to not have location data at all in camera settings.

I found out because the feature of mapping of where your pictures where your pictures were taken did not work for me, because I stopped the camera from having location data.

Sure but I like that feature for myself, but not for apps that snoop your photos’ location data for illegitimate reasons, WhatsApp for example.

Who or what is GGP?

Grand grand parent I suspect.

Throw it behind cloudfront. You now get a terabyte of egress free.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32521279.

(Nothing wrong with a whimsically off-topic observation like this, but boy did the subthread turn lame.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com