Always be careful when opening the port. But yes this is what I do as well, I just keep it behind a VPN

That is a good point. Could potentially not upload the image until the post is created instead of at image choosing, which would also alleviate the issue. But I’m not sure how that would work across web and mobile clients.

The 3 minutes would only kick in if an image was uploaded but then never posted. So nobody would see it anyway in any case.

This route would avoid the issue but also help save on space too.