pameladean

Via

julian: I'm asking those who love the outdoors to post a picture on your page. A picture that you took. Just a pic. No description (but yes alt text!). The goal is to regain peace and harmony without negativity. Please copy the text, put a picture on your page, and let's look at these beautiful pictures.

I continue unable to understand why Dreamwidth's image hosting is so impossible to figure out and convoluted.

P.

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From:

graydon

Generally so they don't have to defend it from bots, or at least so as I understand it.

From:

pameladean

Thank you! That's an actual reason, however deeply annoying its implementation is to me personally.

P.

From:

graydon

If I remember a peripheral view of the discussion correctly, image hosting is a tough job -- the tiny fraction willing to exploit it is in aggregate enormous -- but dreamwidth didn't want to leave people dependent on some external image host (because as anyone with any length of time on the net would tell you eventually that external host goes away). So the ... intermediate position was to make the image hosting a turing test.

From:

asakiyume

This explanation is fascinating to read. I do use Dreamwidth's image hosting, but it *is* cumbersome, so sometimes I put the pictures up on Flickr and copy them from there. Flickr so far has been long lasting (despite changes in ownership), but you're right, eventually things do seem to disappear (or become unusable). I had no idea that people exploited images in the way you mention--actually, do you know what it is that a bot does? Is it that it somehow is able to replace images in undefended storage areas with different images? (How awful, if so.)

From:

graydon

The concern -- and I have no statistical idea how current or prevalent this is! -- is that your image hosting service can be used for something illegal if it can be adopted/co-opted automatically as the back end for some shady service.

(Any service that hosts binary files can in principle host anything, which is why you (for example) sometimes see people hosting pirated ebooks on music services. It's easy to do if the music service isn't carefully checking that you're really uploading music.)

So if there's a way to get a bot to create accounts and load and retrieve content to and from them on an image hosting service, your image hoster can turn into a warez site. And if it can, it probably will. Something like Flickr can deal with that, but it's "full time dedicated staff" levels of "deal". Dreamwidth logistically can't throw dedicated staff at the problem, so it has the three-step image hosting turing test to get an image into a dreamwidth post.

From:

asakiyume

Amazing. I'm appreciating the cleverness of Dreamwidth's solution, just right for an org that doesn't have a lot of manpower for dealing with the problem. It just goes to show: sometimes when something feels like a cumbersome irritation, there's a good reason for it.

From:

dreamshark

I have no expectation that DW will provide me with a fancy image hosting service. I just want to be able to embed an image from ANYWHERE (an external site, Google Photos, their primitive image hosting depository, ANYWHERE) without having to be fluent in HTML. I just want the fracking "image" icon in their RTF editing tool to work. I have never gotten it to do anything at all except insert a tiny, non-working bluish square, that I gather is supposed to be a link to something? If you know how to make their "clever" solution work, please enlighten me and Pamela and the other WYSIWYG dunderheads that are trying to post pictures here.]

Weirdly enough, the one method that does work for me is "post image by email." It has many limitations and is frequently broken, but it does give me a way to post images from my iPhone that actually end up embedded in the post instead of just a link. I have not found a way to do that with photos that are already online somewhere.

From:

asakiyume

... well, I meant that it was clever in the sense that it took into account their own limitations, not that it was great for us users.

I'll tell you what I do, but I don't know if it'll be useful or helpful. Also, I have a paid account. I don't know if that makes a difference.

First, before I try to upload the picture, I resize it to make it a smallish size (usually about 400 pixels by 500 pixels). I have a Mac, so I do this using Preview.

Then I go to the "create" menu on Dreamwidth and select "upload images" and attach the image. Then I hit the "Save descriptions" button at the bottom of the page.

Then I go to the "organize" menu" and choose "manage images." When you're on the "manage images" page, you have two options, "View all your images" or "upload new images." I choose "View all your images."

From there, I look for the image I want to imbed--it should be at the top because I just uploaded it. I have a choice between "image embed" and "thumbnail embed." I don't like the thumbnails, so I choose "image embed"--and since I've presized the image, I know it won't be massive on my friends' timelines. I copy that code, and then paste it into the entry I'm working on.

It's pretty laborious.

From:

dreamshark

Thanks, that might work. I had no trouble uploading and annotating the image, but had not found the "organize" and "manage" menus. I'll give it a try.

From:

graydon

Sometimes!

And the Dreamwidth folks are reliably clever, to get so much lace from a few short shoestrings as it were.

From:

azurelunatic

Also (historically speaking) because Mark banged it out really quickly because he wanted to share baby pictures. And since then it hasn't had much usability attention (Dreamwidth having the usual Geek Engineer Project ratio of backend engineers to usability professionals).

Edited (Accidentally a word) Date: 2021-01-23 10:12 pm (UTC)