We are a picture heavy community here. There are several options to help lessen the load on Lemmy instance caching. One option is to join/host a Pixelfed Fediverse instance. Another option is Post Images. When you are ready to share an image in a comment or post, upload the image to the hosting website, right click/select the hosted picture, and in your browser select view image in a new tab. Your image hosting option must only display the image on this tab for the image to display properly here. Copy the link from this new browser tab and paste it into the image URL option inside your posts or comments. Thanks!

This is intended mostly for users posting links generated by places like imgur that are not the raw image content. These links from imgur include user trackers and do not work well, or at all, with privacy focused browsers. The Post Images website functions like imgur did originally, but has a terms and conditions policy you may or may not agree with. I only mention it as an option because of ease of use.

You can embed URL link images into the main post and into comments using the [](imageURL) or button built into the comment editor.

EDIT: the syntax for embedding URL images in a comment is:

![image](http://this.isTheOnlyPartOfTheSyntaxYouEdit.url/and-this-must-be-an-image-only-and-end-in-an-image-format-like.jpeg)

Ex.2:

![image](https://my.image.url/pic1.jpeg)

Full disclosure [META-INCEPTION]: I am not knowledgeable about the fediverse back end, or its data management. I have seen posts by users that seem more knowledgeable than myself writing about trying to avoid posting images directly to the instance. I have seen a conversation in the Self Hosted community about the size of the instance picture cache and how long instances plan to keep it around. I have no clue how the picture cache on each instance relates to post image retention and permanence. When making posts, using URLs hosted elsewhere the post seems to upload faster IMO. I have asked Ruud about what he considers best practices for visual media. He declined to comment about images. He mentioned they may look into native video support in the future and that we could always make an account on his peertube server and (externally) link to posts there to share here. Please inform me if there is anything I have misunderstood.