One of the guiding principles of the Epic Stack is to limit services (including the self-managed variety). Depending on the needs of your application, you may be justified in reaching for a service to solve this problem. If you have many large images, then finding a service that can host them for you makes a lot of sense.
Currently, the Epic Stack stores images in the SQLite database as a blob of bytes. At first glance, you may think this is a really bad idea, and for some use cases it definitely would be. But it scales surprisingly well (in some cases, serving small files from SQLite can be faster than the file system). In fact, thanks to LiteFS, you get the benefits of replicated storage to all your app nodes.
Currently, the setup is pretty sub-optimal. There's currently no optimization or compression of these images. Whatever goes in is what comes out regardless of needs of the client requesting the image. And if you plan on handling a lot of images, you could bump against the limits of SQLite + LiteFS (it's been tested up to 10GBs).
These limits should be fine for a large number of applications, but we don't want "fine" we want Epic!
Another guiding principle of the Epic Stack is to make things adaptable. We haven't really come around to this for images yet, but hopefully in the future there will be a good solution to making it easy to swap from the self-hosted images to a service.
We also have plans to support automatic optimization of images a la Cloudinary/Cloudflare.
One thing we're waiting on is LiteFS to support object storage. Once that's done, then we'll probably move the images to files in your volume and we'll also be able to use that to cache optimized versions of the images. This will have limited scale, but should be Epic for many applications.
But all of this is work that hasn't been done yet, so if you're adopting the Epic Stack, you may consider adjusting the image to use a service. And if you've got big plans for images in your site, you may want to consider a service.
We'll leave things as they are for now mostly due to time constraints. Examples of using the Epic Stack with services are encouraged and welcome. We definitely want to make it easy to swap out the self-hosted images for a service, so help there would be appreciated as well.
People may start off projects that have ambitious image needs without realizing the image setup here will not satisfy their requirements. A migration would be annoying, but definitely possible.
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