Indafotó
| Indafotó | |
| |
| |
| URL | http://indafoto.hu[IA•Wcite•.today•MemWeb] |
| Status | Offline (content servers still Closing) |
| Archiving status | Saved! (shallow), In progress... (comprehensive) |
| Archiving type | Unknown |
| IRC channel | #archiveteam-bs (on hackint) |
| Project lead | user:bzc6p |
Indafotó was a large Hungarian image hosting service, launched in 2007, and operated by Inda-Labs, that runs quite popular services in Hungary such as Blog.hu, Indavideó, Index Fórum, and is also related to the #1 Hungarian website index.hu.
Late February 2025 they announced that they would shut the service down and delete 13.6 million photos on 2025-03-31. The actual shutdown happened one month later, on 2025-04-30.
Site reconnaissance
As of February 2023, according to the search page, it was hosting more than 8,900,000 photos, but according to the image ids, it had perhaps hosted more than 27 million images (it might be that not all images were public, or some might have been deleted).
Most of the images seemed to be photos of good quality, with little sexually explicit content.
Through the search function, even the oldest pictures were available, dating back to 2007.
58,482 users belonged to the above mentioned images (i.e. that many users had at least one image uploaded); some users had tens of thousands of images uploaded.
Shutdown
Sometime in February 2025, a notice appeared on the top of image pages, reading:
| Original Hungarian | Translated English |
|---|---|
| Szolgáltatásunk hamarosan megszűnik, már csak korlátozott funkcionalitással érhető el. Részletekkel hamarosan emailben és itt a felületen jelentkezünk! | Our service is soon to be discontinued, now it is available only with limited functionality. We will follow up with details via email and on this interface shortly. |
In the last days of February, they specified the closure date in 2025-03-31 and gave the exact number of images to be deleted: 13,641,979. Logged-in users are able to see a more detailed notice (depicted on the right), which also states that uploading of images is not possible since 2025-02-01, and that users are able to download their uploaded images, browsable in folders representing the albums, however, metadata such as description and comments of the images are not included.
The website remained in a fully operational read-only mode for one more month, and the actual shutdown happened on 2025-04-30 10:42 CEST (UTC+2). At that time, the main page and all web content was replaced with a HTTP authentication page. The image servers continued to serve content as of 2025-04-30 20:40 CEST (UTC+2)
Archiving
bzc6p's project
Phase 1: Planning and design
user:bzc6p first conceived the idea of archiving Indafotó in 2020, with the following manifesto:
- With a strong business and technological background, one would think the website is not in danger. However, user:bzc6p considers the time has arrived for archiving the content, for the following reasons:
- – Technical issues (broken search not showing images since April 2019, no https on the main page etc.)
- – Seems to be abandoned by staff
- – The world has changed a lot in 13 years, and while back then blog.hu and index.hu themselves seem to have used Indafotó to store images, they don't any more
- – There is some turmoil around the flagship service index.hu, this might have further consequences
- – Image hosting services are incremental. That is, already uploaded images can be continuously saved – one day they will have to be, anyway.
Phase 2: Slow but steady comprehensive archiving
User:bzc6p discovered 58,482 users and their corresponding 8,914,482 images, the archival of which he started in June 2023.
Time permitting, he used only one thread, this way also minimalized the risk of being banned. The script went after all pages of a user profile, downloaded all image size variants that might be referenced in embed links, and even downloaded unlisted images if any.
Starting with users with fewer images, he was able to archive ~96% of the users and ~33% of the image corpus by the time of the announcement of the shutdown. This concludes users having less than 1,000 public images.
Phase 3: Shallow archiving to get most possible images
The website serves the user profile/image pages relatively slowly, but serves the images themselves fairly quickly. Considering this and the short deadline, starting 2025-03-02, for users with more than 1,000 public images, the archiving switched to a more shallow approach, which targeted saving only the following:
- main image listing pages
- album pages
- preview (medium) size images displayed on these pages
- the highest resolution version of all these images
This way the most meaningful content of the user – the images themselves – got saved, also it'll be possible to simply browse through the user's images when playing back the WARC. However, since images are not simply embedded in HTML in image browsing pages, it'll need some tricks or detailed guidance to view full-size images on playback, but this is something to think about later. The goal was to save the most possible content.
By the announced shutdown date, all users with more than 1,000 images (those not covered in Phase 2) were saved with this shallow approach, so technially all (public) images got saved.
Phase 4: Continued comprehensive archival until the actual end
With the website still up on 2025-04-02, the comprehensive archiving scripts were restarted for the 1,000+ image users, to complement the existing archives with all user pages, as well as with all size variants of images, so that whole user accounts are browsable and all links to embedded images work.
This effort continued until the aforementioned final shutdown of 2025-04-30.
Phase 5: Saving image variants of all resolutions
With the image servers continuing to serve content after the disabling of the main page and image pages, a last phase of archiving was started, aimed at downloading smaller resolution variants of already saved full-size images, to save embedded or otherwise linked images from link rot. These files are augmented to the archives of the respective users (1000+ image users are affected).
Archives
Uploading of archived user content to the following items has been started: https://archive.org/details/@bzc6p?query=indafoto_hu_users_u1k. Items get populated with WARCs slowly (as IA upload speed permits...) throughout 2025.
Exact statistics about the number of archived users and images is being prepared.
Bdamokos's project
(According to an email correspondence)
A group of three volunteers also started an archiving project, aimed specifically at freely reusable (CC-BY and CC-BY-SA licensed) images.
With a bespoke Python toolset developed by Bdamokos, they discovered such images, downloaded full-size images and their metadata, saved image pages to archive.today, and the toolset also provides an interface for browsing saved images. They downloaded 497,418 images (281 GB) this way, and have multiple separate copies of them.
Their plan is to later upload educational/cultural images to Wikimedia Commons.
| Notable websites operated by Indamedia Group | |
| blog.hu · Indavideó · | |