Imgur as a hosting gifs for a flutter app

Question

i need to know if i will face a problem with imgur if i uploaded about 600 gifs on the website and used their links on my flutter app which i will upload it in the play store.

my specific question is about the bandwidth if 10k or 100k person access the same gif within the app, this will create a large bandwidth, so will be there any limitation of the bandwidth ? and does imgur can handle all these traffics ?

and how can i reduce the traffic in flutter ? my last question is what is the difference between if i uploaded my gifs in their main website and used their links in my app (vs) using their api ?

Answer 1

Please read Imgur's Terms of Services, it's quite short actually.

Stuff not to do

If someone else might own the copyright to it, don't upload it. Don't upload gore, "hate speech" (i.e. demeaning race, gender, age, religious or sexual orientation, etc.), or material that is threatening, harassing, defamatory, or that encourages violence or crime. Don't upload illegal content such as child sexual abuse material or nonconsensual ("revenge") porn. Don't hotlink to adult content or to file-sharing, gambling, torrent, warez, or Imgur rip-off sites. Don't impersonate someone else. Also, don't use Imgur to host image libraries you link to from elsewhere, content for your website, advertising, avatars, or anything else that turns us into your content delivery network. If you do – and we will be the judge – or if you do anything illegal, in addition to any other legal rights we may have, we will ban you along with the site you're hotlinking from, delete all your images, report you to the authorities if necessary, and prevent you from viewing any images hosted on Imgur.com. We mean it.

By using Imgur, you are also forsaking intellectual property rights to your images.

Intellectual Property

By uploading a file or other content or by making a comment, you represent and warrant to us that (1) doing so does not violate or infringe anyone else's rights; and (2) you created the file or other content you are uploading, or otherwise have sufficient intellectual property rights to upload the material consistent with these terms. With regard to any file or content you upload to the public portions of our site, you grant Imgur a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable worldwide license (with sublicense and assignment rights) to use, to display online and in any present or future media, to create derivative works of, to allow downloads of, and/or distribute any such file or content. To the extent that you delete any such file or content from the public portions of our site, the license you grant to Imgur pursuant to the preceding sentence will automatically terminate, but will not be revoked with respect to any file or content Imgur has already copied and sublicensed or designated for sublicense. Also, of course, anything you post to a public portion of our site may be used by the public pursuant to the following paragraph even after you delete it.

The difference between imgur API vs. just hyperlinking/embedding the uploaded images are that Imgur API provides a more robust way to interact with Imgur, for example, interacting with the gallery, albums or feeds. In fact, embedding the image is also considered as using imgur's API because you're using the public GET endpoint.

In the apidocs hyperlinked above, under Commercial Usage paragraph:

Your application is commercial if you're making any money with it (which includes in-app advertising), if you plan on making any money with it, or if it belongs to a commercial organization.

Your application is likely commercial if it has 10k user traffic.

By using Imgur API, it allows you to register your application for commercial usage, hence, your website wouldn't be banned and your images wouldn't be deleted.