How can I host my own images?

Side-load images to your own website.

Gregory Claeyssens avatar
Written by Gregory Claeyssens
Updated over a week ago

If you are here, you may need to host your images instead of letting StoryChief manage them for you.
In this article, we will provide you with means to achieve just that, but I'd like to first start with the reason why we host them for you.

It's more than just an image

Here at StoryChief, we strive to give your readers the best experience possible. We don't just host your images, we improve them for the best loading times. We do this on every device your readers may be reading on with responsive images. In layman terms, we optimize them depending on the screen size of the reader. For larger displays, a high-resolution version will be displayed, while we serve a smaller image for screens with lower resolutions. This ensures that every reader receives the best image quality at the fastest speed!
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And because StoryChief works multichannel, we do that everywhere!

It's free hosting which is lightning fast too!

All your images are served through our Content Delivery Network (CDN), which is blazing fast!
Don't forget, if we host your images, that means that you don't have to. That's free storage!

It's not permanent

If you want to host them yourself at a later date, you can! We don't own your images in any way and can provide you with an export of all your images. The process of updating all your stories could be handled by a script.
If StoryChief were to be discontinued (😱 let's hope not!), we will provide plugins to do one-of imports on all the CMS systems we currently support.

OK, so you still want to host them yourself?

For all the WordPress users out there, we have good news!
Our WordPress plugin supports side-loading images out of the box:
​https://wordpress.org/plugins/story-chief/

So you can host your images on your WordPress website yourself.
In the settings turn on Enable side-loading images and click Save changes.

Using a different CMS?

When StoryChief publishes to your website it will provide your website with a clean blob of HTML. What you will able to do is parse that HTML and loop through all the images.
For each image, you can then side-load it and replace the URL from our CDN with your own.

Images are not being side-loaded correctly on WordPress?

It may be that one of your plugins is clashing with ours. ShortPixel is one example. We recommend either seeing if you can add an exception to images sent from StoryChief, or disabling the plugin entirely.


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