Hosting images somewhere else - viable?
<p>Say you have a website that has a gallery of many, many high quality images that you want to provide to your users. Because the images are high quality with large dimensions, their filesizes are huge.</p>

<p>If you wanted to reduce the load on <em>your</em> own server, especially if people download many images many times everyday, you could theoretically upload the images somewhere else, such as imgur, and use the links for your gallery.</p>

<p>Would this be OK to do, or are there any legal repercussions?</p>

<p>That depends on the terms of service of the "somewhere else". Many hosting sites specifically prohibit such use specifically to avoid this use case. I have no idea if imgur in particular, permits such use. <strong>If</strong> the site owner can find a host site which clearly permits such use, there is nothing illegal about it.</p>

<p>I don't know why the site owner would be providing such high-resolution images. Most online users will not need, perhaps not even want, overly high-res images. If the site owner scales the images down, and provides a separate link to a high res version, most users will perhaps not follow that link, saving much bandwidth. But that depends on the specific purpose of the site and the images -- if most users will want/need the full resolution, this would not help. There are free programs that will do image rescaling in bulk.</p>

<p>It depends on the service. </p>

<p>If you're hosting the image on a content distribution network, (e.g. Amazon S3 or CloudFlare) most if not all of their terms of service disclaim any ownership or liability for the content they host.</p>

<p>On the other hand, if you host images on a service like Google Photos or 500px, their terms of service may include the right to reuse content you post to their service.</p>

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