I'm using Google Image Search JSON API to get some results from their search, and then displaying them on user's mobile device.
The problem is that lot of found images are larger than required for the phone screen and therefore the download of the image can take too long on mobile networks. What I'd like to do is to cache these images off-site, to use something as a proxy. So if user first requests an image, he'd ask an app/web service for it. The web service would download the image on his behalf and return him resized (for example 240x320px) image with reasonable JPEG compression.
This would speed up the image loading a lot. My question is, what should I use for storage of these images? I plan to use at most 2 GB cache - storing 80,000 JPEGs. I'd like my mobile app to be free, so I'd like to avoid paying much for this service.
If I fill the cache fully to take 2 GB of space, and have 10,000 users viewing 10 images daily on average, I'd have 2,5 GB daily data transfer .
I've found these two options:
- Amazon S3 (costs about $0.1 per GB stored/transferred -> $7.5/month)
- common webhosting ($3/month)
Can I also use Dropbox or Picasa or Flickr somehow?
