I believe there are pros and cons for both. Imgur is great because you truly don’t have to think about disk space or bandwidth. Imgur is not great because they can delete your posts at any time without warning and leave holes on the interenet, especially if we’re talking 5, 10 , 20 years from now.
Should I invest in a beefy server to store all of my photo needs without storage anixety? Or should I just rely on a larger company to handle it for me? I think I’m already answering my own question by writing this post out, but I’d love to hear from the self hosting community.
You mentioned a timescale for data retention of decades which means doing it yourself is the only option.
Nothing that exists now existed either 20 years before now or is likely to exist in 20 years: I’m sure you can still download all those photos off your Friendster account or from photobucket (in case of confusion: lol no).
Of course with a multi-decade requirement, then you’re going to have to manage hardware, backups, and validating data integrity. The last one being the big one because everything will bitrot if you give it enough time, so it’s not like it’s just drop it on a drive and forget about it.