Does anyone know a way (plugins or similar) to offload media (images mostly) in wordpress to an external service? like flicker, or imageshak?
I think that offloading images from the wordpress installation increase significantly the mante the maintainability of your site, and not mentioning the speeding up of the backupping process!
One sad note is that many themes need the images on the same server to create thumbnails for post previews, while I thinks a better approach would be to create temporary made up files of the images.
thanks!
You can check out the following plugins that use an external storage for media. Some of them supposedly use the build in media (S3), while other simply allow you to use the storage in your post (azure) via a button.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/windows-azure-storage/ , yes Microsoft wrote this plugin.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tantan-s3-cloudfront/ Amazon S3 for WordPress.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cdn-sync-tool/ Several services(cloudfiles, s3, maxcdn, etc)
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pressbox/ Dropbox
The tag on WordPress which has more options: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/s3
Have you considered a service like CloudFlare? They are free and work as much more than just a CDN, also providing added security and bulletproof DNS services. VERY easy to get going, and once you do, the image caching, CDN, minification of JS and CSS, etc… is all automatic.
I’ve been using them since they first started the service and it’s been absolutely stellar for me and many of my clients.
I’m adding this in as an option I didn’t see listed above… W3 Total Cache (link below).
https://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/
I use this because it has a wide range of CDNs it supports, including a generic setting, and will also take care of offloading media files, theme files and other core files that don’t necessarily need to be served from the same webserver.
You can also define custom directories to be offloaded to your CDN if you are need something stored offsite that doesn’t fall within the normal WP file structure.
Another option – wpengine.com have a pretty stellar repulation as a dedicated WordPress hosting company and they recently released what promises to be seamless integration with Amazon S3 for large storage needs. It might be the best of both worlds.
I’m not affiliated in any way – but I am thinking of trying it myself.
I have also been looking into hosting my WordPress blog’s images in a third party service, and have a plugin helping me seamlessly integrate this strategy.
I found these options:
That’s the only solutions that get any close to what I was looking for. But maybe there are others, please post a comment if you find another one!