Imgur

Tier 3 image origin — free unlimited hosting + REST API, ImgBB mirror

Imgur

Role

Tier 3 origin in the 4-tier image-host chain. Operates as a mirror / hot-link backup to ImgBB: the same upload payload is pushed to both services in parallel from CI. If both Tier 1 (repo-hosted) and Tier 2 (ImgBB) fail at runtime, the <Image> wrapper falls through to the Imgur URL.

Free tier

• Unlimited image uploads + bandwidth
• 20 MB ceiling per JPEG / PNG / GIF (PNGs over 5 MB get re-encoded to JPEG); 200 MB ceiling for video
• REST API at https://api.imgur.com/3/upload with both anonymous and OAuth2 modes
• Anonymous rate limit: 50 uploads / hour per IP
• Authenticated client: 12,500 uploads / day, 1,250 / hour
• Free image URLs at i.imgur.com/<id>.<ext> with permanent stable IDs

Card / subscription required?

NO. Free-tier sign-up is email; client ID for the API is issued without payment method. No card requested anywhere in the flow.

How it’s used

1. Same CI step that uploads to ImgBB also POSTs to https://api.imgur.com/3/image with Authorization: Client-ID <IMGUR_CLIENT_ID> (from Doppler) + base64 body.
2. API returns { data: { link, deletehash, ... } }.
3. The URL is committed to the post’s frontmatter as image_tier_3:.
4. The treats it as the fallback after ImgBB.

Methods supported

Anonymous upload (Client-ID only), OAuth2 (account-bound), URL upload, base64, multipart form. No paid plan, no card path.

Alternatives

• ImgBB — Tier 2 sibling
• repo-hosted — Tier 1 default
• GitHub user-content — Tier 4 for files

  20 MB or animated content we don’t want re-encoded

Swap cost

Low — single env var (IMGUR_CLIENT_ID) + one CI step. Existing URLs keep resolving from i.imgur.com regardless.

Why this is our pick

• Free unlimited, no card
• Independent provider from ImgBB — Tier 2 + Tier 3 outage at the same time is highly unlikely; that’s the redundancy point
• Mature service (around since 2009); low operational risk
• Permanent URLs by default (don’t auto-delete unauthenticated uploads)

Imgur quirks worth knowing

• PNG > 5 MB gets re-encoded to JPEG. For PNGs that must stay PNG, use GitHub user-content Tier 4 instead.
• Animated GIF support is fine; large GIFs are converted to MP4 for streaming — the original GIF URL still serves.

Cross-refs

• 4-tier image-host decision
• ImgBB Tier 2 sibling
• repo-hosted Tier 1
• GitHub user-content Tier 4
• 3-tier image-CDN chain — delivery wrapper
• No card-on-file rule
• Never-hit-quotas rule

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