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Hi all, is there a service that lets you share photos with others that is at least a little privacy-respecting? Think something like Imgur, but more open and less privacy invasive.

I'm not looking for something like Pixelfed (which is great if you want an Fediverse Instagram alternative!), nor am I looking for something like Immich (photo backup that I already self-host on my local network!), I'm looking for a public service where I can upload images that can be shared via a URL.

Ideally, I should have some amount of organisation (at the very least the creation of albums), have support for larger files produced by my mirrorless camera (nothing crazy, images are 6000x4000px and are usually several MBs each), and not hosted in the U.S., China, or similar

Self-hosted suggestions are okay too, but public services are ideal

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[-] arsCynic@piefed.social 9 points 2 days ago

https://pixelunion.eu/ uses Immich. Usage below 15GB is free.
I use it to embed images on my photography web page https://www.smetterling.eu/, or to create shared albums with others.


FYI this weekend they've been doing some maintenance and are upgrading to a new Immich version, so perhaps you may still see some error notifications.

[-] ExtremeDullard@piefed.social 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Any one of the many Pixelfed instances seems okay to me. I host my photos on this one. You can share the image's URL, so I'm not sure what your problem is with Pixelfed.

[-] ExtremeDullard@piefed.social 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

You may also be interested in what I do to host my huge 360° photos and videos: I store them in a GitHub repo with Github Pages enabled. Github web pages are CORS-enabled, so you can share images to your heart's content, and the limit is 100MB per file.

My repo is here, and the resulting page to view the 360 content in it is accessible here.

No privacy though. Github is Microsoft. But you can encrypt the files - and I assume if you want every Tom, Dick and Harry to be able to view one of them, privacy isn't really necessary.

[-] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 days ago

Since you already run Immich; why not use it's share links?

The page they bring you too has the image/video embedded in it alongside showing metadata, but you can right-click/long-press and 'open image in new tab' to get the raw image link for embedding in lemmy posts or wherever you needed a public image link.

[-] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 5 points 2 days ago

Since you already run Immich; why not use it's share links?

Because then I would need to set up a domain name, reverse proxy, and that sort. I don't have the time to troubleshoot networking stuff, so locally hosted it is for now. When I do get the time, I will set that up!

[-] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago

That's fair. When you mentioned your self-hosted services and that self-hosted suggestions are welcome, I assumed you had some of that infrastructure setup already.

You'll need it for any self-hosted option made public.

[-] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 day ago

When you mentioned your self-hosted services and that self-hosted suggestions are welcome, I assumed you had some of that infrastructure setup already

I mentioned this as self-hosted services were going to be recommended anyways (because they're awesome!), but for something that is public, it's something I will do later rather than now.

[-] fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk 4 points 2 days ago

It depends exactly how you're sharing things - I use "pCloud" for online storage, which allows sharing links to files and folders.

You can either share folders of things which can be previewed/downloaded within the pcloud website, or put them in the "public folder" which should allow direct linking to the files. It has no comments/social media style stuff tacked on - just files.

Their servers are in Switzerland, and they are considered to have good privacy.

However, they're not open and it does cost money.

You can pay a one-off payment instead of monthly etc, if that makes a difference. I think when I got mine it was something like £200 for 2TB permanently, though that was quite some years ago now.

Note that they appear to be in a perpetual state of "special offer! 50% off!", though the discount varies, I think it's probably never "full price" - but if they're presenting the price as "unmissable, limited time only", I assure that it is "missable".

[-] TastySoup@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago

Not a photographer, but last time I needed to share pics I used https://www.pcloud.com/. It was a good experience, I created password protected albums, and nobody had any issues accessing them. Maybe worth checking it out?

[-] Zachariah@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Immich using PikaPods managed hosting

[-] ian@feddit.uk 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I use Nextcloud for easy photo and document sharing. It has a gallery thumbnail display too. And a choice of privacy levels. I use a free, hosted Nextcloud, as I don't have a server.

this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2026
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