Object storage and WebDAV

Choosing a storage typeCopy Anchor Link

After New channel on the Storage channels page, you first pick a type:

• Object storage: Amazon S3, Cloudflare R2, Tencent Cloud COS, Alibaba Cloud OSS, Backblaze B2, MinIO / self-hosted and S3-compatible (generic). All of them use rclone's s3 backend and differ only in the preset provider, endpoint and region.
• Cloud drives: WebDAV (later on this page) and the drives that need authorization (see Cloud drives and OAuth).
• Advanced: Custom, where you enter an rclone backend name and raw parameters.

Templates expose only the fields that matter and preset the rest. Saving merges them into the full backend parameters; editing reverses the merge to refill the form, including fields that were folded into the endpoint (account ID, region).

Object storage templatesCopy Anchor Link

Every object storage template also has an optional Public URL, described below. The fields:

Create the bucket firstCopy Anchor Link

ImgYoung adds no_check_bucket=true to every s3 channel, so rclone neither checks for nor creates the bucket before uploading.

The reason: by default rclone attempts to create the bucket before uploading. Scoped credentials, common with R2 and MinIO, can read and write one bucket but not create buckets; when the bucket already exists that attempt returns 403 and the write fails, while the read-only light check keeps passing. The channel looks healthy yet uploads fail. Buckets are expected to exist already, so the attempt is skipped by default.

So:

• Create the bucket in your provider's console first, then create the channel.
• If your credentials can create buckets and you want ImgYoung to do it, turn on Create the bucket automatically in the create form. ImgYoung then tries to create the bucket once (an existing bucket is fine); if that fails the whole creation is aborted with 自动创建存储桶失败(请确认密钥具备建桶权限,或先在控制台建好桶并关闭此项): plus the cause ("creating the bucket failed; check the key can create buckets, or create it in the console and turn this off"). The switch only exists at creation, and Test connection never creates a bucket.
• In custom mode, setting no_check_bucket=false explicitly restores rclone's check-and-create-if-missing before uploads.

Public URL and 302 direct linksCopy Anchor Link

Public URL (public_base_url) is optional: the URL prefix under which the bucket (or a CDN in front of it) serves objects publicly, such as https://cdn.example.com. A channel can only issue 302 direct links once it is set.

A direct link is <public URL>/<object key>, and the object key is relative to the channel's storage path. If the Bucket field includes a prefix, the public URL must point at that prefix too: with my-bucket/imgyoung in Bucket and a CDN serving the whole bucket, the public URL is https://cdn.example.com/imgyoung. A trailing / is stripped.

An image is redirected only when all of these hold:

1. Settings → Runtime settings → Access & links → Access mode is redirect · 302 to direct links;
2. the channel has Allow 302 direct links on and is not encrypted;
3. the channel has a public URL;
4. the channel is healthy, holds a ready replica of the image, and is the highest-priority channel meeting the conditions above.

Otherwise the image is proxied. With Allow 302 direct links on but no public URL, the form warns "public_base_url is not set, so direct links will not take effect and access falls back to proxying".

The 302 response carries Cache-Control: no-store, so neither browsers nor CDNs cache the redirect, and switching channels, retiring one or an image expiring takes effect immediately. Objects are written with a Content-Type sniffed from their content, so even though object keys have no extension, a browser opening a direct link displays the image.

Public read access on the bucket has to be enabled at the provider; ImgYoung does not check it. Public read also means anyone holding a direct link can fetch the object without going through ImgYoung, so hotlink protection only applies to requests that do. See Access and links for the full picture of access modes.

Custom modeCopy Anchor Link

Advanced → Custom takes an rclone backend name and its parameters directly. Use it for backends the templates do not cover — any rclone backend works, such as sftp, ftp, azureblob, or local on another disk.

• rclone backend: the backend name, i.e. the type value in rclone.conf, such as s3, sftp or local.
• Backend parameters: key–value pairs whose keys are the backend's option names, written as in rclone.conf; only letters, digits and underscores are allowed. Copying from the output of rclone config show works (put the type line into rclone backend).
• Two reserved keys are not passed to rclone: path is the storage path inside the backend (bucket and prefix, or a folder), and public_base_url is the public URL. A local channel without path uses <data dir>/blobs.

rclone stores password-type options (options rclone flags as passwords, such as pass for sftp, ftp and webdav) in an encoded form. ImgYoung handles this: plain values are encoded, and values that already are encoded (for example copied from rclone.conf) are kept as they are. In rare cases a plain password happens to look like an encoded value and is passed through unencoded, which shows up as an authentication failure; run rclone obscure <password> and enter its output instead.

rclone backend       sftp
Backend parameters   host = files.example.com
                     user = imgyoung
                     pass = <password>
                     path = /srv/imgyoung

WebDAVCopy Anchor Link

The generic WebDAV template sits in the Cloud drives group of the type picker and covers Nutstore, Nextcloud / ownCloud, Synology, Alist and the like. They all use rclone's webdav backend and differ only in the server URL and the server type, so there is one template for all of them.

Server type options and the rclone vendor value each maps to:

WebDAV channels have no public URL, and the form hides Allow 302 direct links and Create the bucket automatically; reads are always proxied. Chinese cloud drives such as Aliyun Drive and Baidu Netdisk are also connected over WebDAV, see Cloud drives and OAuth.

Common errorsCopy Anchor Link

Failure reasons from Test connection, and the reason shown when hovering Unhealthy in the Status column, are translated from the underlying error into the hints below (case-insensitive, first match from the top). An error that matches nothing is shown as its first 200 characters; Test connection additionally scrubs credentials from it (the values of parameters rclone flags as passwords or sensitive).

Common rejections when saving the form (returned immediately; no channel is created):

Once a channel exists but shows Unhealthy, fix its configuration and use Probe again in the row menu: it runs a deep check right away and refreshes the status. The probe and status rules are in Channels and failover.