I’ll echo that photos is an essential feature to this site. When I surf/host, they are usually at least as important as what they write in me making a decision to whether to send or accept requests. Feel like we should first identify how big of a problem this is cost-wise (both short-term and long-term) and discuss different ways to solve it, rather than preemptively making core feature changes to address what is essentially a cost-savings measure? There are other things you can do as well, such as limiting image size/quality and discarding the original image, or archiving old profiles’ images that is cheaper to store but requires some time to read from.
Also, I quite like how Couchsurfing (before it turned into paid, at least) and Couchers have profiles being public. I think if we want to make decisions to hide photos by default and only expose to certain people like your friends, such decisions should ideally be made upon privacy / security reasons, not just to save on server costs.
(Oops, this is an old thread and I’m just resurrecting it, sorry about that)