Say goodbye to Imgur hosting!

[Ray Rivers]

So I understand that image hosting terms of service for Imgur are changing and images submitted by free users are deleted after not being accessed for 6 months.

Looks like another Photobucket apocalypse inbound.

Folks should plan accordingly and either embed their images to the post or use the gallery for linking their photos.

[Elbows]

This is actually why I have a blog...mainly because it just lets me throw all my photos on there, but yeah image-hosting is disappearing pretty quick if it's not on a social media platform.

[FifteensAway]

As Elbows says, have your own blog.  Google is free.  So, until Google decides to kiss blogging goodbye one day (maybe?), a blog is the way to go.

And if I can manage a blog, you should be able to do it too.  It's pretty easy even for a more-or-less Luddite like me.

[fred]

For fucks sake

I’d actually got quite into the workflow of posting images via Imgur

None of it is primary storage for me. But used it lots for forum logs and painting diaries.

[AKULA]

Folks should plan accordingly and either embed their images to the post or use the gallery for linking their photos.

Embed? What is this witchcraft?

[Ray Rivers]

Embed? What is this witchcraft?

Using the attachments feature. I guess "embed" was the wrong technical term.

[Ray Rivers]

For fucks sake

I’d actually got quite into the workflow of posting images via Imgur

None of it is primary storage for me. But used it lots for forum logs and painting diaries.

Start a gallery here, Fred. You can link your photos from the gallery to anywhere; though that is actually not correct as you are using the bandwidth of this forum for other purposes. You can still use the gallery to post photos to your threads here.

Does the Pendraken forum allow you to "attach" images to your posts?

[Redshank]

So I understand that image hosting terms of service for Imgur are changing and images submitted by free users are deleted after not being accessed for 6 months.

Looks like another Photobucket apocalypse inbound.

Folks should plan accordingly and either embed their images to the post or use the gallery for linking their photos.

Do we know what "accessed" means exactly?

I don't have that many photos on there. It would only take me about 5 mins to go through and click on each one.

[fred]

Had a look at the changes - and it references deleting images not linked to active accounts. Which is a bit different. What it means is that if you move on from Imgur then old images you linked to are likely to disappear at some point.

The change was actually live a few days ago (15th)

[Ray Rivers]

Could that also mean that if you don't log onto your account at least every 6 months, it will be considered to be inactive?

[Easy E]

Yeah, my Blog has made image hosting much easier.

However, considering what has happened to Message Boards, Vine, Google+, etc.  How long until Blogs are consumed by the other Social Media Apps completely?   

[fred]

Could that also mean that if you don't log onto your account at least every 6 months, it will be considered to be inactive?

Who knows, but possibly.

I suspect they are trying to do a bit of a clear out of old stuff to free up storage capacity. But I’ve not seen the definition.

[FramFramson]

There's a trend of this going on among tech companies, despite it having been a taboo for so long, as Google had also announced that they were going to delete any Google or Google-related accounts which have been inactive for 2 years. They've already had to walk back what would have deleted most of YouTube's 20-year history (YouTube being one of many sites owned by Google), but internet history has always been relatively ephemeral and impermanent, especially in the case of anyone who's no longer with us, which is also where the loss might sting the most.

Of course there's legitimate questions about how much effectively-public data a private company should be obliged to archive and for how long; storage costs aren't free and just imagine how much data the internet might accrue in just a century of ever-expanding activity. But it seems the big wave right now is mainly trying to establish new, far more restrictive precedents and simple opportunism rather than any particular crushing burden of cost.

Anyway, rather than straying too far into the off-topic, the point is we should all be prepared both for more sites to announce similar policies and for new restrictions on any and all forms of non-paid storage going forward. LAF's image attachment function will be something of a step backwards unfortunately, as it is sadly a bit dated (and it notoriously sometimes rotates images for as-yet undiscerned reasons), but might still be preferable to any form of outside storage going forward, unless you're confident you'll log in to your Imgur (or other hosting) account every couple of months.   

[Ray Rivers]

There's a trend of this going on among tech companies, despite it having been a taboo for so long, as Google had also announced that they were going to delete any Google or Google-related accounts which have been inactive for 2 years. They've already had to walk back what would have deleted most of YouTube's 20-year history (YouTube being one of many sites owned by Google), but internet history has always been relatively ephemeral and impermanent, especially in the case of anyone who's no longer with us, which is also where the loss might sting the most.

Of course there's legitimate questions about how much effectively-public data a private company should be obliged to archive and for how long; storage costs aren't free and just imagine how much data the internet might accrue in just a century of ever-expanding activity. But it seems the big wave right now is mainly trying to establish new, far more restrictive precedents and simple opportunism rather than any particular crushing burden of cost.

Anyway, rather than straying too far into the off-topic, the point is we should all be prepared both for more sites to announce similar policies and for new restrictions on any and all forms of non-paid storage going forward. LAF's image attachment function will be something of a step backwards unfortunately, as it is sadly a bit dated (and it notoriously sometimes rotates images for as-yet undiscerned reasons), but might still be preferable to any form of outside storage going forward, unless you're confident you'll log in to your Imgur (or other hosting) account every couple of months.

An interesting post, mate.

It seems to me that to lose all this content that has been generated on the internet to be a terrible loss. Perhaps what is needed is a National Archive for digital content like the one they have for books.

As for image storage here on LAF, the personal galleries are, IMO, the way to go. Once you have uploaded a photo to your gallery, it is quite easy to use the link of your photo to paste in your posts. I have on many occasions gone to the gallery and viewed hundreds of images just for the fun of it.

Another down side to using the attachment function is that if you go to the "View the most recent posts on the forum" function, attached photos will not be shown, as opposed to those that are linked to.

Perhaps I am unique in that the biggest reason I come here is to see the photos.

[FramFramson]

Perhaps I am unique in that the biggest reason I come here is to see the photos.

I would hazard a guess that you're not even remotely unique in this particular sense.