Using external hosting services for photos?

  • Unknown's avatar
    hermanistan · Member ·

    My question is about using external hosting services for images. Apologies for the lengthy post – I’ve invested some time trying to get things to work and have come up against some significant limitations, so I’m reaching out for guidance.

    For context…I’m setting up a site which will feature a lot of photos. Some of the photos will be viewed on large screens. Image quality is important. As I set up the site I need to plan for the future (because I don’t want to have to toss out all the work I will do and start over on another platform later).

    I currently have a Premium Plan, which includes 13 GB of space for media. That will be OK for a while, but given current technologies and trends (modern cameras take large, high resolution photos; I take a lot of them; users have large high resolution screens; these trends will all surely continue in the future), even with careful image optimization, at some point the 13 GB of space included will run out. For many of us, photo storage is now routinely figured in TB — Terabytes — not Megabytes. I am 100% sure my needs will exceed 13 MB eventually. Maybe not for a while, but in the coming months/years, definitely.

    So before I do all the work and commit to WP, I’m looking for options — options that won’t be crazy expensive. I get 13 GB with my Premium Plan for starters. Now I’m looking for ways to also utilize images I already have on other, external hosting services.

    I see the obvious option in my Media panel to use images stored on Google Photos. Great, I have that, and Google gives me 15 GB of staorage (13GB + 15GB, now we’re getting somewhere…). But then I see that images on Google Photos are actually copied to WP, and that

      will

    definitely count as part of my WP quota. So there’s no real benefit in doing that. Well, Google’s not the only option for image storage…

    I have images stored elsewhere on several other services (some of which I pay for, some of which are free) and I have some on my own paid domain. In my WP Media panel, I see an option to “Add via URL” which looks promising. But it appears that will only do the same thing – that is, it will copy an image from some external URL, into my WP media library, which will again count against my quote. Sad trombone. :/

    But I note that in your own documentation, you refer to using external file hosting services for media. In fact, you suggest that for this exact scenario: when you run out of space on WP, you say that an alternative is to “embed remote images and videos.” Here’s the WP support document where that’s suggested: Adding Storage Space (scroll to the last section, just before “Can I cancel my plan?”).

    OK. I’ve found that this sort of works, but only in a very limited way. I’ve tested with images linked from Flickr (which is explicitly suggested in your support document as an option), I’ve tested with images on Google Photos (

      linked

    from, there, not copied into my WP media library) and also at Amazon Photos. I’ve tested with multiple browsers on MacOS and Windows, and on iOS. Almost everything I’ve tried fails.

    Here’s what I think I’ve determined:

    1. It seems that images hosted on external sites can not be used in WP

      Galleries

    at all — At least I’m unable to get them to work; if that’s supposed to be possible, please point me to a reference. This, if true, will be very disappointing, so I’m hoping that I’m just missing the right way to do it.

    2. It also appears that images hosted on external sites can not be used as a “Featured Image” – there’s no way to enter an URL for that.

    3. It seems that

      some

    external images can be embedded inline manually using the HTML img src tag, like so:
    <img src="INSERTLINKHERE" />

    But that only works reliably/consistently with simple image links that terminate with file extensions .JPG or .PNG (perhaps one or two other common image format extensions, I haven’t tested everything). But if you have a link that ends in anything else, fuggedaboudit.

    This is highly problematic because nowadays, many image hosting services generate custom URL links that do not fit that format. Google, Amazon, Adobe, and many others typically generate image links for shared files that are often very lengthy and that do not end in a three-character file name extension. URL shorteners like Bitly (and others) that do similar things also fail, presumably for the same reason. It appears your code is expecting something that ends in .JPG or .PNG and it it doesn’t see that, it won’t correctly interpret the link as pointing to an image.

    The only hosting service that I’ve found to work generally is Flickr. Although I had some limited success with Google and Amazon (both use long non-standard link URLs for shared images), those only worked inline in some desktop/tablet browsers – those image links failed completely on Android phones and iPhones I tested (oddly, they did work on iPads, but not iPhones).

    So, based on my testing (which I’ll admit was not exhaustive but does seem indicative), this ability to use images hosted elsewhere (outside of WP) seems very, very limited. It only works reliably with images hosted at Flickr (maybe elsewhere), all image links

      must

    end in an easily-recognized file extension (.JPG or .PNG), and most limiting of all, images hosted elsewhere can only be used inline, and can not be used as a “Featured Image” or in Galleries.

    Are my findings above correct? Expected?
    Any work-arounds?
    Any plans to remove any of these restrictions?

    I hope all the above makes sense. Thanks for the help.

  • staff-ozmodiar · Staff ·

    So, the short answer is that WordPress.com may not be designed for the way that you are looking to use it. Yes, storing thousands of full-resolution images is going to fill up your media library fairly quickly. WordPress.com is set up to host web-resolution images. With 13GB, you can upload 13,000 1MB files. For most bloggers, even those with image heavy sites, that is many years of blogging. Even if you uploaded 5 images every day of the year, it would take you ~7 years to reach your limit.

    If using WordPress.com is important, you might want to just use Flickr to externally host and then live with the slight limitations that come with it.

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