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+--- Thread: Imgur is deleting a lot of old images (/showthread.php?tid=2965)
Imgur is deleting a lot of old images - VinnyVideo - 05-08-2023
Source
There's a good chance you've already heard about this, but Imgur, one of the more well-known image-hosting sites, recently announced plans to delete a lot of images on the site on May 15. Images that aren't connected to a registered Imgur account are most at risk for deletion.
What does this mean for you? Well, if you've ever used Imgur to share an image anywhere on MFGG, there's a decent chance that it's going to be deleted. This might mean avatars, signatures, game screenshots, or random memes you posted. Imgur has been pretty popular for a long time - there's a lot of Imgur images on this forum, a whole lot of images on the phpBB archive, and a handful on the IPB archive.
You might want to make sure that there aren't any important Imgur-hosted images on this or previous iterations of the MFGG forums. Since image hosts can be flaky, it's always wise to keep an offline backup of anything that's special to you (please, please, PLEASE don't use Imgur or any other free file host as your only backup of anything important!).
If anyone wants to try to use an automated scraping tool to rescue Imgur-hosted images from MFGG, be my guest.
RE: Imgur is deleting a lot of old images - SonicKade2048 - 05-08-2023
It feels like such a disgusting move once you really look at it in retrospect. Part of, if not THE main draw of Imgur was that we could host files easy and anonymously, letting people get a quick link for their forum post, YouTube video, etc. I know I'm still relatively new (I wasn't here for most of the phpBB era or the entirety of the IPB era), but I still understand how significant this'll be. Sucks that the winds of change made things go awry again. History being erased, if you ask me...
RE: Imgur is deleting a lot of old images - VinnyVideo - 05-14-2023
@SonicKade2048 Yeah, it's a bummer - Imgur has been a very popular host for a long time, so I'm sure this will cause some cool stuff to disappear.
That said, this kind of thing isn't unprecedented. In my experience, other image hosts tend to remove images after a while, especially images that aren't viewed often or that aren't connected to a registered account. Some image hosts have died altogether - Tinypic was one biggie that I used to use.