Images from remote source - is it possible or is it bad practice?

Question

I'm building a management system for websites and I had an idea related to image galleries. I'm not sure it's a good approach. Since image space needed is related to how many images a user might upload, I thought about using cloud services like DropBox, Mega, and Google Drive to store images and load then when needed.

The obvious problem with this approach is that downloading the images from the 3rd party service would hamper the user experience due to the increased download times.

Is there any way to save images belonging in an image gallery on remote source without hampering the user experience because of speed? Or is this approach really not a good practice?

Answer 1

There is remote and remote...

First of all, know that Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and I'm sure, many others do that a lot.

There are two things where I would be careful:

1. I would use the same main domain name (i.e. images.my-domain.com)

2. I would make sure that the server(s) are close between each others.

Point (2) means that if you get 2 or 3 servers in the same data center, then the speed of transfer and connections will be the same between all the content so you'll be good.

Note that Google Webmaster tools will tell you that since you use multiple sources for your pages, that it is "bad". You'll just have to ignore that warning.