The Link Rot Problem
Every photo you store in the cloud depends on a subscription. Stop paying for iCloud, and Apple deletes your files after a grace period. Google Photos compresses and potentially purges content when storage limits are hit. Flickr deleted millions of free-tier photos in 2019. The pattern is clear: your media lives only as long as the hosting provider lets it.
Arweave offers something different. Upload a photo once, pay a one-time fee, and it stays accessible forever. No monthly bill. No storage cap. No terms of service that let the provider remove your content.
How Media Storage Works on Arweave
When you upload a photo or video to Arweave, it becomes a transaction with content-type tags:
Content-Type: image/jpegorvideo/mp4App-Name: ardrive(or whichever uploader you use)- Any custom metadata you want to attach
The file is replicated across Arweave's decentralized network of miners. Gateways serve the media over standard HTTPS with the correct headers, so images render in browsers, videos play natively, and audio streams normally. The URL never breaks.
ArDrive: Your Permanent Hard Drive
ArDrive is the most popular media storage application on Arweave. It works like Google Drive or Dropbox, with a drag-and-drop interface for uploading files and organizing them into folders. The key difference: everything you upload is permanent.
ArDrive features include:
- Public and private drives: Encrypted files that only you can decrypt, stored permanently
- Folder organization: Familiar file management with drag-and-drop
- Version history: Upload new versions without losing old ones
- Free uploads under 500 KB through the Turbo bundler
- Multi-currency payment: Pay in AR, ETH, SOL, or by credit card
Comparison: Cloud Storage vs. Arweave
| Feature | iCloud / Google Photos | IPFS + Pinning | Arweave (ArDrive) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost model | Monthly subscription | Monthly pinning fee | One-time payment |
| Data persistence | Until you stop paying | Until pin service stops | Permanent |
| Censorship risk | Provider can delete content | Depends on pinners | No single point of control |
| Encryption | Provider-managed keys | Optional | End-to-end (ArDrive private drives) |
| Link permanence | URLs change, accounts expire | CIDs persist only if pinned | Transaction ID is permanent |
No More Link Rot
Every piece of media stored on Arweave gets a transaction ID that doubles as a permanent URL:
https://arweave.net/bNbA3TEQVL60xlgCcqdz4ZPHFZ711cZ3hmkpGttDt_U
That URL will work today, next year, and decades from now. The storage endowment ensures miners have economic incentive to keep serving the data long after the original upload fee was paid.
This is particularly important for media shared publicly. Blog post images, portfolio photos, creative works shared on social media: all of these break when the original hosting goes away. On Arweave, they persist.
Real-World Scale
Arweave already stores a vast amount of media. Over 130 million NFTs with their associated images and videos live permanently on the network, uploaded through Metaplex on Solana. Beyond NFTs, ArDrive users have uploaded terabytes of personal files, from family photos to professional archives.
The cost is surprisingly low. Storing 1 GB of data on Arweave typically costs a few dollars, paid once. Compare that to $2.99/month for 200 GB on iCloud, which adds up to over $35 per year, every year, forever.
Why Permanence Matters for Media
Photos and videos are how people document their lives. Wedding photos, childhood videos, creative portfolios: these are irreplaceable. Trusting them to a service that requires ongoing payment and can change its terms at any time is a risk most people don't think about until it is too late.
Arweave's permanent data storage model removes that risk entirely. Pay once, and your media becomes part of the permanent record of the internet.