Investigate using AWS S3 or Digital Ocean Spaces to store images

[alanqchen]

A big bottleneck for page load time is currently image loading. A good idea might be to use AWS s3 to store the image and leverage a CDN.

[alanqchen]

When implementing this, it's important to try to upload directly from the client (rather than say a serverless function on Vercel) to reduce latency as much as possible:

[alanqchen]

As an update, the client will likely send the file to the server as it makes it easier to also still support self-storage without too much bloat and only the editors will be uploading images, who are more likely not to care too much about an increase in latency, as long as the loading times for the visitors are reduced.

[alanqchen]

Another interesting option would be to use s3 behind cloud flare's CDN (free): https://medium.com/tulua/blazing-cdn-with-amazon-s3-cloudflare-7ba52659f32d

[alanqchen]

Unfortunately, I haven't had much time to work on this with the current workload of school + internship applications, but I do plan to continue to improve this when I have the time in the future.