A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Commenting more so I can easily find this thread again, since I'd be curious as well.
For personal photos that I share I use Immich, and Immich-Proxy for sharing the photos (so I'm don't want to directly share the actual URL of my Immich server). Works well for that, but doesn't anywhere meet the drag and drop simplicity of Imgur.
Thank you for the Easter goose, kind sir. Blessings of the divines upon ye!
Remembered that I made such a tool for myself ten years ago. Dusted off a backup, updated dependencies (and replaced some), refactored somewhat, changed license to AGPL and uploaded here: https://codeberg.org/nykula/imgie
Should be very easy to install because the backend is just ImageMagick and SQLite.
Beware of a 250M node_modules, though. My code is less than 1K lines in the initial commit, but the linters, bundlers etc are the same as I use for big projects.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| LXC | Linux Containers |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| SATA | Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
| VPN | Virtual Private Network |
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.
[Thread #199 for this comm, first seen 29th Mar 2026, 15:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Was this a bot
Yes, it has the bot icon
Sorry I’m new
If it's strictly for personal use, Nextcloud can do this easily (no upload required since the client handles the sync), although it's a very heavyweight way to do it and for security reasons most people probably have Nextcloud set up behind a VPN-wall like Tailscale or something so it may not work for you.
However, it technically has a share link feature that does exactly this. If you're using the desktop or mobile client you just have to put it in one of Nextcloud's sync folders and then right click on it or whatever to get a share link to the file. You can also do it through the web UI (both the upload itself and getting the link to it) You can make the share link public and permanent so anyone who can access the Nextcloud server can get access to that file through the link.
Worth considering if you already have a Nextcloud instance. Alternately, if you aren't already using Nextcloud for sensitive personal files, and just want a repository of silly meme images you can share freely, giving public access to it (it's still locked behind an account for upload and general access) isn't that much of a security concern and then your public links should work just fine.
If you want something that is more of a social media site and image gallery like Imgur is, maybe Immich can handle some of that, but if your goal is simply sharing image file links, I'd focus on looking for things that are more for sharing files, since images are just files and it doesn't sound like you need all the complex image-specific handling really.
I've heard of Immich for other stuff, but I'd probably use it for my personal photos. This would be for, as you put it, silly memes to share online. I know most cloud services have a share link feature, but I'm thinking of something low friction, just plop the image and the link is autogenerated. Image resizing would be nice though. Like I said, what Imgur does.
Immich doesn't explicitly support hotlinking, I remember it being a bit annoying to get an embeddable link? (Might have just been for video?)
Embeds from Immich work really well!
https://framagit.org/fiat-tux/hat-softwares/lufi
Edit: I thought this was image only, but apparently it is more of a general file hosting tool.
Note: Lufi encrypts uploaded files and lets one share a link containing a decryption key. It doesn't let one expose images for other websites to embed. Thus a good tool but not for OP's purpose?
I run Picsur. It let's you convert, resize, and compresses well. picsur.org
I'm just getting a clownflare server down error.
Back when I was on IRC, I wrote a bash script to upload (via scp) a file to an uploads location on my server, which it knew the public URL for. It then (using xclip) put the resulting URL into the clipboard so I could paste it into IRC. Worked well
I use this for misc file sharing: https://github.com/filebrowser/filebrowser It installs as an app on unraid, nice and easy.
It supports direct links: https://files.nighed.xyz/api/public/dl/cmR8NjHz?inline=true (I don't think these expire, I guess I will find out if someone complains...)
Or a download UI: https://files.nighed.xyz/share/cmR8NjHz
I could just use a bare web server but I’d have to scp the images over every time.
Or just make a script and hotkey the script! https://drkt.eu/files/scripts/media_tool.py
If it's just for you, then you don't need to tackle the hardest problem of content moderation.
The second hardest problem is bandwidth. If you post something to a forum that suddenly gets a lot of traffic, without some kind of CDN intermediary, you'll get a hug of death and/or a huge bill for all the bandwidth.
The third hardest problem is uptime. My assumption is that you want the content to remain valid forever. No one likes seeing dead links in old forum threads. So as you use it over time, anything you've posted over the years could get a sudden unexpected viral hug, or you have to let it die (which may not necessarily stop the hug, since everyone would still be trying to ask your server for the content).
Just making sure you appreciate how difficult solving this problem inevitably becomes. Note that discord and Lemmy Posts let you upload images, so you shouldn't need such a service in those cases. But for random forums, it quickly becomes hard.
I use Picsur. It’s very similar. I have liked it quite a bit.
Slink might be easy enough to set up with Docker: https://docs.slinkapp.io/getting-started/02-quick-start/
Upd 22:04: tried setting it up with Podman instead of Docker, and the instructions didn't work, first because of missing directories and then a permission issue. However, this can be because I tried on WSL rather than a dedicated GNU/Linux box.
How about Chevereto
I think zipline (github.com/diced/zipline) is that.