[Peripherals] windmills

Tue May 13 20:16:37 EDT 2008

Inspiring discussion here. I wish every university science and engineering
student knew to subscribe to this list.

Here's a synopsis of image hosting options I wrote for another international
listserv, orthopod at googlegroups.com,
===================================================
Quick synopsis of image hosting options on the web today

Talking about what you see is something that makes sense to the human mind.
Unfortunately, for the machines tasked with the job over the internet, there
are two problems with sending images over email: it's unpredictable and it's
inefficient of bandwidth and storage. With millions of mail servers around
the world, there is nearly infinite variability in what size of files your
recipients may or may not be able to send or receive over email. A single
mail server may be the only one available for a large number of people,
bandwidth may be expensive, storage may be expensive. Depends on the
population in question. So, when addressing an international group, you
really can't predict what any individual will receive other than text.
Secondly, while email servers are extremely good for asynchronously sending
a few bits assembled into very dense information, like words, mail servers
are not a very efficient way of transmitting many bits assembled into low
density information, like pictures or audio files.

Fortunately, web servers are a very efficient way to transmit large amounts
of low density information asynchronously. I'll focus on first-in-class
options for each class (the classification being my own arbitrary thing, it
is certainly incomplete and inaccurate).

When we google for free image hosting ( http://www.google.com/search?q=free+
image+hosting), imageshack.com is the top result, which is very commonly
used to submit pictures to even to the biggest forums, like reddit.com.

simply follow the link and, from their site, browse to the image you want to
upload and imageshack will upload it and host it for you and provide
cut-and-paste links for any number of purposes. For this forum, I recommend
grabbing the link from the bottom, "direct link to image" and paste it into
your orthopod message, like this:

http://img230.imageshack.us/img230/1847/stethophonefq4.jpg

That's the easiest way to circumvent storage and bandwidth limits. A much
more sophisticated service (arguably the best on the web) is flickr.com,
which will allow free accounts up to 200 photos at up to 5MB each. Paid
accounts can store an unlimited number of photos, each up to 10MB.

Another common way to host images is using a public blog tool, such as
blogspot.com, which is what the pulmonary and critical care folks do at
pulmonaryroundtable.blogspot.com.

Finally, the googlegroup itself will host up to 100 MB of images (there's a
link on the right of the post page ( http://groups.google.com/group/orthopod
/post?)), but I don't see a readily available static link and, of course, it
is of rather limited capacity.

Summary of web service models for images
(best viewed in monospace font)

service       access                 max photo size  max photo count
==========    ===================    ==============  ================
imageshack    anonymous              1.5MB           unlimited photos
flickr free   account tied to email  5               200 photos
flickr paid   account tied to email  10MB            unlimited photos
googlegroups  tied to group account  group limit = 100MB
blogspot      I have no idea

For every service named, there are many, many similar alternatives. Of
considerable significance for some: Secure Computing and other large-scale
proxy services block many of these first-in-class services by default.
===================================================

On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 5:19 PM, Ian Daniher <it.daniher at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi All,
> As list admin, I have to ask people to try and use links to images instead
> of attaching or embedding them in messages to prevent cluttering inboxes and
> to be nice to OLPC's server. If people need some place to stash their
> images, I can likely create an anon FTP web site through a third party.
> Keep the great discussion flowing!
> --
> Ian Daniher
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Peripherals mailing list
> Peripherals at lists.laptop.org
> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/peripherals
>
>

-- 
Niels Olson
Tulane School of Medicine
Class of 2009
niels.olson at gmail.com
h/c: (410) 212-1281
alt: (443) 221-4648
http://nielsolson.us

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