Request for unmetered storage - Preliminaries

[socapexx]

Hello, first of all, I am aware I will have to wait 7 days before I can have unmetered storage. The reason I am asking early is simply that, in the case you refuse, I have to find some other free hosting service. So far I am impressed with x10 and would like to continue using it.

My website is socapex.x10host.com. I am and will use it to store my Public Domain texture library. These are all my own pictures, and I have decided to release them to everyone in the most relaxed license possible. These high resolution images are extremely useful to 3d and 2d game developers, graphic artist, design artists and anyone in between. Since they are lossless in compression, Illustrator/Photoshop/Substance Designer algorithms work really well with these, where JPG noise actually renders many images useless.

They can be used directly as game textures, as a basis for paint-overs/pixel art, converted to vector graphics or simply as an inspiration/reference picture.

I know this website is in a grey zone when it comes to your Terms of Services. Please review it knowing that:

1) All these images are mine, I took them and I own them. There is no copyright infringement.
2) No images of questionable nature will ever be hosted on the website (adult/violence/intolerance etc). These are simple high-res 2K textures.
3) By making these public domain, I will not be making any money what-so-ever on the work, which means I need a free hosting service.
4) Your own graphic designers can benefit from these images. They can use them/modify them/distribute them and practically do as they please.

I hope you understand this is an honest website, released with the best of intentions.

 

[socapexx]

?

 

[essellar]

As you said, grey area(s). The folks who regularly haunt this forum probably don't feel qualified to make any definitive statements. My guess is that it wouldn't fly on Free Hosting, not because it necessarily breaks the rules, but because it skirts so close to a bunch of them that automated tools would flag it continuously, and maintaining an exceptions list that only excepts legitimate use cases requires human time and effort. You want room for images that aren't really images, so you make them texture packs. But the file size limit (10MB) means you cant fit many 2K by 24-bit lossless into an archive (an alpha channel makes things worse; 48-bit colour is pretty much out of the question), so you need a lot of downloadable files with a generic archive extension (ZIP, RAR, TAR.GZ or similar). And that makes it hard to tell from less-legitimate sites that look extremely similar at the filesystem level. Then there's the whole DMCA trip if your rusty diamond plate looks a little bit too much like somebody else's rusty diamond plate, etc., etc. It starts to sound like there would need to be too much human intervention to be practical on Free Hosting, given that if they let you do it, they'd have to let anybody else with a similar plan do it as well. (It's easy to make one exception; it's a lot harder to make a bunch of them, and harder still to explain why other sites aren't quite the same thing.)

Again, not definitive - you'd probably have to wait for Corey's word on that - but it's my best guess as to how this would pan out.

 

[socapexx]

First off, thank you for taking the time to write a very good and sound response! It is appreciated, even if not necessarily what I want to hear. The images are currently 8bit (so I was able to bring them down to ~8.4MB PNG each), which is good Some of these look simply astonishing in Substance Designer, even if the don't seem like much just like that.

I can and will host the full archive on adrive or some other similar service, but what I want here is for google image bot to be able to index the images, with the metadata, to help advanced image search. They have all been tagged in Lightroom, so google searching for Public Domain grass (big image setting) will have these pop up. Everything on the web is behind a damned closed wall. It is so hard to find good textures when you are working, sigh. Google Drive/OneDrive/insert 100 billion services don't work because I need the actual file to be accessible.

Anyways, I've continued my search and found a very very sketchy host that allows 10GB. OK for my current collection, though I'd much prefer stick around here as this service seems quite nice.

Have a good day, crossing fingers.

 

[caftpx10]

@essellar does seem to have great ideas. As your images are bit big but are under the 10MB limit, you should place them in an archive to reduce the resources used while downloading regardless. Also, I'm not sure if you are already aware of this but you could have a preview displaying a way smaller version of the image (in terms of size) to again reduce the resource usage and to keep it fast enough for the user to download/display.

Anywho, it would be interesting what Corey would think about his, as this is very awesome.

 

[socapexx]

Check out the website, the thumbnails are already smaller. Also, the full archive is not going to be hosted here. Finally zip or bz2 on images doesn't really do much. 8.4MB per image is very small and reasonable

 

[essellar]

Image tags aren't a problem if you can get reasonable external hosting for the files themselves (without transformation, of course, leaving EXIF intact). Google will follow the tags for indexing. HREFs would be a problem, I think. (And seeing as an uncompressed TIFF would be about 50MB, 8.4 lossless isn't too bad. You could probably have saved some additional space with an optimizer, but after the keywording, etc., it's probably too late to go that route with the existing textures; the optimizer would strip the metadata, so you'd need to do all of that before keywording.)

 

[socapexx]

Exactly. The tiffs are 22.2MB. Normal PNGs where 20MB but "save for web" did a great job at minimizing them even more. I intentionally didn't use optimiser since google image bot parses the metadata, so I want to keep it there at all costs (it contains license, keywords + camera lens if people want to lens correct etc). Google image bot also doesn't work on tiff for metadata, so png seemed like the route to go.

 

[Skizzerz]

Hello,

Why not upload low-res previews of the images here and then use a file hosting site such as dropbox or box for the full-res downloads? Your site here could provide direct download links to the files hosted on that service. That way you don't need to worry about 10MB per-file limits and could distribute multiple related textures within a single download.

While there is nothing stopping you from uploading the full-res versions to x10Hosting as well, you will be met with numerous restrictions for doing so. The first one is that we automatically remove files over 10 MB in size after a couple hours, and the second is that this would more likely than not qualify as an "image gallery" and thus be restricted to a total of 500 MB across all images.

 

[socapexx]

This is exactly why I asked The full image lib is 8GB, which means dropbox and such don't work (aren't free). Also, details on why I need "actual" hosting, and not file hosters that hide the files behind custom downloaders, are provided in the thread. Since you are staff member, is that a no?

 

[caftpx10]

Google Drive has 15GB by default. You also have imgur as an option (may need to have a look at that as there seems to be differences within the Google results).