Motivation

Why create an image hosting service?

Well, because all the other options right now come with some big compromises. Free services compressing and deleting images, commercial CDNs being expensive and inflexible, and S3-style storage being slow and hard to manage.

Here's what my priorities were:

• Images never expire or get compressed
• Global edge delivery for fast loading everywhere
• Free (or very very low cost) to deploy and run
• UI needs to make uploading, organizing, and managing images quick and easy

Also, there are some nice quality of life features, which a really good CDN should have:

• On-the-fly image transformations (like resizing) to reduce bandwidth and speed up your app
• Real-time analytics to track image traffic and origins
• Easy backup/sync to your own storage bucket
• AI classification for semantic searching and filtering
• Neat URLs and custom domains
• API access for automation and integration