We have been burning through disk space too quickly and the long-term solution is to store the images on Amazon S3 which is basically a “big disk in the cloud”. I switched over all new images to be hosted there as of this morning and it seems to be working OK but let me know if any image is not showing up.
Soon I will also migrate the older images over so all the images are in the same spot. This migration takes some time and some images may not load correctly during the migration so I will give a heads-up here first before starting the migration.
The cost of Amazon S3 will bump our overall costs up by a bit but not by much - I think it will be under $10/month. We should be good indefinitely with this set-up, the posts themselves take up very little space so we have hundreds of years worth of space for them now
Scott, I know you have a cash cushion from the little “fundraiser”, but when that runs low I hope you don’t hesitate to speak up. This site is worth a lot to lots of people, and I’m one of them! Thanks for all you do to keep it running smoothly.
FYI I am migrating the old images over starting now. During the transition some images may be broken but all should be OK when its all over in a few hours. Assuming nothing goes wrong
OK I think they all got migrated… it will take several more hours for the site to rebuild all the optimized images (the smaller ones you see before you click on the image), and hopefully all will be good with the images for a loooong time!
Let me know if on Monday you notice any missing images or other glitches with images.
Hmm, it looks like a bunch of pictures didn’t make it over yet so I am re-running it. The site seems to be suffering performance-wise during this. I am going to try to get it all done and over with tonight so we can have this issue behind us finally. Just re-load if something is not showing up.
The site is having trouble on my tablet. I have to refresh the page several times to get it to come up. It sometimes will load, sometimes will give an error message, especially after hitting the home icon.
It’s actually gave me an “error 429” message when I tried to submit this post!
Does the new image location have smaller file size limits? Perhaps its not related, but tonight for the first time ever, each time I try to upload a photo from my phone I get an error message from the GF web site saying “file size too large, limit is 2040kb”. Was the size limit larger before or am I somehow just accidentally trying to upload larger (file size) photos? Thanks.
The limit has been the same but they keep changing around the code to resize images. At some point it was my code, I got tired of them not fixing the problem so I wrote some code for it. It has been changed several times since then.
Anyway we have tons of space now on Amazon so I upped the size to 4 megs which will hopefully allow most photos to get resized OK. If anyone is having problems after now with photos too large follow up here and I will look into it.
Thanks scott. I’ve always resized my photos to “large” on my phone before sending them in and they always were accepted until recently, so I didn’t know if it was a code thing or a change in size limit. Thanks for the response.
it looks like it was my fault this time … I made a big change on the site configuration this weekend and it looks like I may have introduced a bug. Which should be all fixed now. Let me know if any big images are not working.
… OK just made one last change, now it will take original images up to 20MB in size. That limit was 10MB before. Note that png and gif still need to be below 4MB, but any jpg will be resized and even really big ones should load OK now.
