Art Assets "From the Web"

The "From the Web" search section of the art library tab has left me rather confused. I can drag the things found there to my table and use them as normal, but they are not added to my library unless I "star" them. If they are added I can't find them anywhere. It would seem that these assets are being used in the game straight from the web, without being stored by roll20, and without counting against my library limit. Seeing this feature, I can't help but wonder, why does roll20 have its own library/asset hosting at all? There are countless image and generic file hosting solutions available to everyone, all far more user friendly and polished than roll20's library. However, the only support for externally hosted images I've been able to find is the fairly unreliable "From the Web" search. If roll20 is able to use externally hosted images, why can I not just feed it imgur or dropbox links? Why only this one search? I feel like there must be a reason. They wouldn't go to all the trouble of providing image storage themselves if they didn't have to, but I can't for the life of me figure out how "From the Web" can be a thing if that is the case.

They host the marketplace assets

The marketplace assets aren't what I'm talking about. The search has three sections: From Your Library, From the Marketplace, and From the Web. Its the third of these sections that is confusing me.

From the Web is handy for quickly finding art for a game, but remember that the image you find on the web today could be gone tomorrow. If you want to use your maps and tokens months or years from now, you need find them outside of Roll20 to download them to your PC and upload them into your Roll20 Library as you need them. Yes it counts against your space, but it's the only way to be sure the image does not go "poof" some day. For a quick pick-up type game that you won't re-use anything from, From the Web can be handy indeed to throw things together quickly.

Assets "From the Web" are cached in Roll20 and do not count against your library limit.   While I'm not privy to the decisions made by Roll20's developers, I can tell you that Roll20 stores images in a 3rd Party service in the Amazon Cloud.  Amazon Web Services provides a very stable content distribution network with data centers across the world allowing content to be delivered to players rapidly.  Controlling the image hosting also prevents problems for that content being removed or replaced.

The Aaron said: Assets "From the Web" are cached in Roll20 and do not count against your library limit. Thank you for responding, but that hasn't really cleared anything up for me. When you say they are 'cached' what do you mean by that? Have they just pulled a bunch of assets from around the web that they are letting you search though? If so, and they do already have these things stored before anyone is using them, why does adding them to my library count against my library total? Also, if these assets are pre-selected and cached, why is there so much random crap in among the images? The random inspirational poster pictures and pictures of nick cage's face that come back when you search for unrelated things make it feel much more like a live web search than a pre-selected cache of images. If they aren't pre-caching things, and you meant that they cache things once you have selected them and brought them into your table, then why doesn't it count against my library total before I star it? I could have 10x my library capacity in random junk that they would have to cache for me without having anything in my library. If space isn't an issue, then I'm right back to why can't I just feed in links from imgur... I can see what you mean about them wanting to ensure the content doesn't just vanish. For stuff from random website that makes sense, but not so much for stuff that players have specifically stored somewhere so they can use it. I don't know a whole lot about network services, but is the speed of delivery really going to be that much better from Amazon's data centers than it would be from imgur or some other file host?

The search is of assets from a curated list of sites.  Assets drawn into Roll20 are then stored in a library of From the Web assets, similar to a player's library.

Ah, I see. That answers most of my questions. Thanks for your help.