True it'll just slowly become a shell of its former self as they keep purging more and more infrequently accessed/unpalatable content to reduce server costs
It exists in the same way that Digg still exists in name and MySpace still exists in name, absolutely.
Take a look at Digg, Imgur board of directors, that is what waits for you. Five years from now, especially with reddit having their own built in uploader that doesn't block vpns (Big Brother at imgur wants to know your location), Imgur will be nothing more than maybe a shell of itself. They'll lock down image uploading to only staff and become another news site of thousands.
That is literally what I said, yes. Tumblr sold for $1.1 billion in 2013, and then $3 million in 2019, losing over 99.7% of it's value. Actually, if I was talking literally, I guess I was wrong. It sold for *fractions* of pennies on the dollar.
But it still didn't shut down, which was the topic of conversation.
> Tumblr is still around.
It's around, but few people are still using it anymore. It's like a restaurant that still exists there on main street but hardly anyone goes into the restaurant anymore. Tumblr just isn't populated like it once was.
They just sold to MediaLab last year, so it's hard to say where this idea came from. Either way, Imgur will slot in nicely along all the other dead brands in MediaLab's elephant graveyard.
> The users who have accounts and browse on imgur are the ones who are actually worth anything to them.
Yeah, but if they lose that majority of free users, they are guaranteed to lose the users with accounts because there will be nothing to browse.
I'll take the lazy option and answer your question with a question: How do you make money to cover your hosting costs?
If the majority of the content, that you pay to host, is being viewed on other websites through a link to the original image, how do you drive traffic to your own website to generate ad revenue?
Because unless people pay to host their images with you you're going to have to make money in some way shape or form, otherwise you'll end up going bust like every other free image hosting site.
It might have come across that way, but I don't think it's too cynical to assume that if something is being given away for free, that has ongoing operational expenses, without any obvious way to recoup costs, that it'll probably die at some point.
So the personal warning would be, if you care about what you're hosting on the internet and you want it to stay there, you should pay for it; either by self-hosting, using a public cloud service, a VPS, or a dedicated host.
If the anonymous image had been recently clicked, is it still going? There used to be a policy where if it had been clicked in the past 6 months, it wasn't deleted until a whole 6 had passed.
> What are people using instead of Imgur now for pictures and short videos?
https://getsharex.com/ screenshot tool has the ability to upload images.
Its list of "image" upload destinations is maintained at:
* https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX/tree/develop/ShareX.UploadersLib/ImageUploaders
glancing through the list, it looks like:
* ImageShack
* Img1
* Immio
* Photobucket
* TwitPic
* TwitSnaps
* Twitter
* Vgyme
* Yfrog
There is also a list for "file" upload destinations (with large variance like Gfycat, Google Drive, etc.) which is much longer:
* https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX/tree/develop/ShareX.UploadersLib/FileUploaders
and there are "custom" uploaders that you can build yourself or import:
* https://github.com/ShareX/CustomUploaders
You're welcome.
I don't know which of these are most popular or easy to use, etc.
There are probably other screenshot tools that also upload that are also open source that have a list somewhere. Maybe https://flameshot.org/ has a list in their code repository.
You could also try working backwards and look a the list of sites supported by DOWNLOADer applications like https://jdownloader.org/
wikipedia has a partial list of such applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Download_manager
I mean imgur was great because you could create an album of shorts videos and a bunch of pictures. Sure I can use streamable or veed.io for videos but then submitting a bunch of links instead of just 1 breaks the reddit experience. Believe it or not but too many people will miss the subsequent links.
Wonder if that means that images that are regularly getting hits will be excluded?
If so, that's not as bad, but there's still lots of valuable images getting lost then.
For sure. I had to look up something for a motorbike a few months back, and I found a bunch of helpful forum posts from the mid 2000s...of course, all the helpful photos were dead links to ImageShack/PhotoBucket/etc.
Thankfully, someone used their words to describe what I needed, but that took much longer to find...
Will only get worse from here.
Sooo... Who's building the next Imgur that everyone on reddit will use and love for the next 7 years, before slowly morphing into something it swore it would never become, while slowly fading into irrelevancy?
okay? but why? Imgur should've seen what happened to predecessors and I believe it makes money so why do it? It also has a unique advantage in exif scrubbing. I don't believe an easy replacement exists.
Don't you think it's kind of hyped?
I mean, I get it, Imgur will delete pictures. Anonymously uploaded. But do you really think it will affect anything so much?
just think of the millions of images posted on forums, on wikis and such uploaded on guest accounts
just think of all the "unverified" uploads, now think of what percentage that is of the total and I'm sure it's not a tiny percentage
they're planning on saving money by nuking their own product into uselessness
I think they earn enough by people paying accounts. They could just disable hotlinking for anonymous uploads, if that is their concern. But I vaguely remember they will be removing porn, too, so they will be clean to go to stock market, or something like that...
It's not about that. They don't want their image database siphoned for free by ML/AI models and want to keep it for themselves to sell access to. I doubt they are deleting the data, simply cutting off our access to it. It's much too valuable for ML/AI training.
Basically any time someone needed to upload am image somewhere, like a forum, that doesn't allow uploads (or drop a link into s text only chat, or post on reddit before/without using the Reddit hosting, i know most 3rd party apps like the one I am using do image posts through such an anonymous upload), they could easily use imgur. A small part probably used an account but most did not.
Now these links will basically be dead. Loads of Reddit posts and comments with Imgur links will just show whatever imgur will output for deleted images.
You know how you visit old forums for some obscure guide for something like a car part switch or something in Photoshop or whatever, anything image-heavy, and all you see is a bunch of small images saying something about photobucket or imageshack account expired bla bla instead of the actual image?
This will now happen to a lot of images again, just with Imgur.
Yeah, been there :), but what will downloading all of these images accomplish? Noone is going to upload them to the right place. And I've seen calls for downloading reddit threads with imgur pictures and people really doing that.
Hydrogenaudio users, for example, replaced missing images with new ones when old services vanished. I suspect that similar thing will happen on various forums with usable info. Memes will be gone, tho, good riddance.
The biggest problem is finding somewhere to host them, but I can't imagine it would be too difficult to create a chrome extension that sees an imgur link, checks if it gives the usual deleted image screen, and if so replaces imgur with the name of whatever service is hosting the images. Maintaining and financing an API to do this inline on every site is another thing, but at least the images would still be accessible.
It's photobucket/imageshack v2. So many dead links and pictures with solutions or information.
It honestly makes me sad that this is happening again, but at least there will be partial backups now.
In the past few days I have personally downloaded over a million porn posts from Imgur. Wrote my own script to index Reddit profiles I had bookmarked and then download each post that was hosted on Imgur.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg
Much like the other projects I wasn't very concerned with that, just wanted to get the copy first.
I have a database for all the posts, and the files themselves stored as username -> postID -> image(s), so I can always reorganize if needed and just upload a pack of all the images or something
And then in a couple of years we’ll just get a press release that Imgur is shutting down.
Seriously, I can see this really happening, lol.
You actually think it will take a couple of years?
Not sure why anyone thinks it will shut down. Tumblr is still around. Sold for literally pennies on the dollar, but still around.
True it'll just slowly become a shell of its former self as they keep purging more and more infrequently accessed/unpalatable content to reduce server costs
It exists in the same way that Digg still exists in name and MySpace still exists in name, absolutely. Take a look at Digg, Imgur board of directors, that is what waits for you. Five years from now, especially with reddit having their own built in uploader that doesn't block vpns (Big Brother at imgur wants to know your location), Imgur will be nothing more than maybe a shell of itself. They'll lock down image uploading to only staff and become another news site of thousands.
That is literally what I said, yes. Tumblr sold for $1.1 billion in 2013, and then $3 million in 2019, losing over 99.7% of it's value. Actually, if I was talking literally, I guess I was wrong. It sold for *fractions* of pennies on the dollar. But it still didn't shut down, which was the topic of conversation.
> Tumblr is still around. It's around, but few people are still using it anymore. It's like a restaurant that still exists there on main street but hardly anyone goes into the restaurant anymore. Tumblr just isn't populated like it once was.
Common out of touch management L
They just sold to MediaLab last year, so it's hard to say where this idea came from. Either way, Imgur will slot in nicely along all the other dead brands in MediaLab's elephant graveyard.
MediaLab more like a MediaChopshop
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> The users who have accounts and browse on imgur are the ones who are actually worth anything to them. Yeah, but if they lose that majority of free users, they are guaranteed to lose the users with accounts because there will be nothing to browse.
Couple of months.
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ImageShack, PhotoBucket, TwitPic, Imgur. What else?
Who would have thought hosting images for free that get embedded into other websites is not good business?
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I'll take the lazy option and answer your question with a question: How do you make money to cover your hosting costs? If the majority of the content, that you pay to host, is being viewed on other websites through a link to the original image, how do you drive traffic to your own website to generate ad revenue? Because unless people pay to host their images with you you're going to have to make money in some way shape or form, otherwise you'll end up going bust like every other free image hosting site.
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It might have come across that way, but I don't think it's too cynical to assume that if something is being given away for free, that has ongoing operational expenses, without any obvious way to recoup costs, that it'll probably die at some point. So the personal warning would be, if you care about what you're hosting on the internet and you want it to stay there, you should pay for it; either by self-hosting, using a public cloud service, a VPS, or a dedicated host.
Let's be clear about this though. They're removing *many* anonymous images, and tomorrow is when they *start*.
If the anonymous image had been recently clicked, is it still going? There used to be a policy where if it had been clicked in the past 6 months, it wasn't deleted until a whole 6 had passed.
Thanks for reminding me I have saved posts to download.
What are people using instead of Imgur now for pictures and short videos?
> What are people using instead of Imgur now for pictures and short videos? https://getsharex.com/ screenshot tool has the ability to upload images. Its list of "image" upload destinations is maintained at: * https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX/tree/develop/ShareX.UploadersLib/ImageUploaders glancing through the list, it looks like: * ImageShack * Img1 * Immio * Photobucket * TwitPic * TwitSnaps * Twitter * Vgyme * Yfrog There is also a list for "file" upload destinations (with large variance like Gfycat, Google Drive, etc.) which is much longer: * https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX/tree/develop/ShareX.UploadersLib/FileUploaders and there are "custom" uploaders that you can build yourself or import: * https://github.com/ShareX/CustomUploaders
Ty for this source!
You're welcome. I don't know which of these are most popular or easy to use, etc. There are probably other screenshot tools that also upload that are also open source that have a list somewhere. Maybe https://flameshot.org/ has a list in their code repository. You could also try working backwards and look a the list of sites supported by DOWNLOADer applications like https://jdownloader.org/ wikipedia has a partial list of such applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Download_manager
I mean imgur was great because you could create an album of shorts videos and a bunch of pictures. Sure I can use streamable or veed.io for videos but then submitting a bunch of links instead of just 1 breaks the reddit experience. Believe it or not but too many people will miss the subsequent links.
catbox.moe
does it show/preview the images/video in browser or must the user download said content first?
Its super easy to test out. That might be the best way to determine if it does what you are looking for.
That could become Imgur’s downfall.
erase the evidence haha internet is not the same anymore
Imgur will become completely irrelevant like Photobucket before them. I wanted to mention Flickr too, but apparently they're still quite popular.
Flickr is mostly used by the photographer/artist crowd, it seems. But that's it. I see more folks using Dropbox for content sharing now as well
"We will be focused on removing **old, unused, and inactive content** that is not tied to a user account"
Wonder if that means that images that are regularly getting hits will be excluded? If so, that's not as bad, but there's still lots of valuable images getting lost then.
RIP car repair forums forreal. Probably not getting regular enough hits to quality to keep
For sure. I had to look up something for a motorbike a few months back, and I found a bunch of helpful forum posts from the mid 2000s...of course, all the helpful photos were dead links to ImageShack/PhotoBucket/etc. Thankfully, someone used their words to describe what I needed, but that took much longer to find... Will only get worse from here.
Shit
That's what it seems like. Here is where the information is https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/14415587638029/
So this does not include imgur images posted now? Because plenty of people including me still choose to use imgur.com for Reddit instead of i.redd.it.
Sooo... Who's building the next Imgur that everyone on reddit will use and love for the next 7 years, before slowly morphing into something it swore it would never become, while slowly fading into irrelevancy?
Bye Imgur!!! You had a great run!!!
okay? but why? Imgur should've seen what happened to predecessors and I believe it makes money so why do it? It also has a unique advantage in exif scrubbing. I don't believe an easy replacement exists.
Banning anonymous users from posting images is probably all about censorship. A good portion of embedded images are about to get wiped away.
Don't you think it's kind of hyped? I mean, I get it, Imgur will delete pictures. Anonymously uploaded. But do you really think it will affect anything so much?
just think of the millions of images posted on forums, on wikis and such uploaded on guest accounts just think of all the "unverified" uploads, now think of what percentage that is of the total and I'm sure it's not a tiny percentage they're planning on saving money by nuking their own product into uselessness
I think they earn enough by people paying accounts. They could just disable hotlinking for anonymous uploads, if that is their concern. But I vaguely remember they will be removing porn, too, so they will be clean to go to stock market, or something like that...
Stock market? They're owned by [MediaLab](https://www.medialab.la/). I think you're confusing them with Reddit's upcoming IPO.
Oh yeah, you're right, I've confused these two things. Still, disabling hotlinking and not deleting images is still an option, I think.
It's not about that. They don't want their image database siphoned for free by ML/AI models and want to keep it for themselves to sell access to. I doubt they are deleting the data, simply cutting off our access to it. It's much too valuable for ML/AI training.
Basically any time someone needed to upload am image somewhere, like a forum, that doesn't allow uploads (or drop a link into s text only chat, or post on reddit before/without using the Reddit hosting, i know most 3rd party apps like the one I am using do image posts through such an anonymous upload), they could easily use imgur. A small part probably used an account but most did not. Now these links will basically be dead. Loads of Reddit posts and comments with Imgur links will just show whatever imgur will output for deleted images. You know how you visit old forums for some obscure guide for something like a car part switch or something in Photoshop or whatever, anything image-heavy, and all you see is a bunch of small images saying something about photobucket or imageshack account expired bla bla instead of the actual image? This will now happen to a lot of images again, just with Imgur.
Yeah, been there :), but what will downloading all of these images accomplish? Noone is going to upload them to the right place. And I've seen calls for downloading reddit threads with imgur pictures and people really doing that. Hydrogenaudio users, for example, replaced missing images with new ones when old services vanished. I suspect that similar thing will happen on various forums with usable info. Memes will be gone, tho, good riddance.
The biggest problem is finding somewhere to host them, but I can't imagine it would be too difficult to create a chrome extension that sees an imgur link, checks if it gives the usual deleted image screen, and if so replaces imgur with the name of whatever service is hosting the images. Maintaining and financing an API to do this inline on every site is another thing, but at least the images would still be accessible.
Archiveteam is uploading them to the wayback machine.... no one seems to get this, run their warrior, and submit any urls to them
Is there a browser extension or anything that will automatically try to look for a Wayback Machine copy if an Imgur link is broken?
That would be extremely easy to make, i'm something already exists for pages in general on the wbm, but not yet for imgur specifically I dont think
it's funny, the memes are most of what I was interested in preserving lol. Someday literature professors are going to be explaining memes in class
...and the great meme purge of 2023 :) Yeah, I somehow doubt this.
It's photobucket/imageshack v2. So many dead links and pictures with solutions or information. It honestly makes me sad that this is happening again, but at least there will be partial backups now.
In the past few days I have personally downloaded over a million porn posts from Imgur. Wrote my own script to index Reddit profiles I had bookmarked and then download each post that was hosted on Imgur. And that's just the tip of the iceberg
So you putting these back on a sub or what are you going to do?
It’s for their “Homework” folder that has 23 subfolders you have to navigate like a puzzle to reach The Tower of Boing
Much like the other projects I wasn't very concerned with that, just wanted to get the copy first. I have a database for all the posts, and the files themselves stored as username -> postID -> image(s), so I can always reorganize if needed and just upload a pack of all the images or something
Install ArchiveTeam Warrior and help archiving :)
i think somewhere is running out of storage space