Imgur

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Imgur
Imgur logo
Imgur homepage screenshot.png
URL https://imgur.com
Status Special case
Archiving status Not saved yet
Archiving type Unknown
IRC channel #imgone (on hackint)

Imgur is an image sharing community and former image host.

Vital signs

Seems stable for now. Images submitted by free users are deleted after not being accessed for 6 months.

Imgur serves a massive amount of traffic. In 2012 alone, 42 petabytes of data were transferred. Fortunately, the amount of images uploaded is much less, albeit still a lot. In 2012, around 300,000,000 images were uploaded; assuming an average size of 120KB, that's 36TB in one year. As of 2014, there were 650 million images with 1.5 million being added each day according to one source[1]. An analysis in 2015 based on extrapolation from a sample of random image IDs estimated about 2 billion images with a total raw full-resolution image size of 376 TiB[2].

Imgur was originally created as a gift to the Reddit community because of problems experienced with other image hosting services. It was used extensively on Reddit for many years until Reddit introduced their own native image host (at http://i.redd.it/) in 2016, causing a significant decrease in submissions to Imgur.

In 2018, there were reports that Imgur had started to enforce their terms of service, specifically that using Imgur for image hosting is not permitted and may result in deletion of those images[3].

In 2021, Imgur was acquired by Medialab

Archiving galleries

When archiving a larger gallery, eg. https://imgur.com/gallery/PTFfu, a simple ArchiveBot !ao won't do because of the JavaScript "load more" button. However, you can append /zip to the URL to get all pictures in full like so: https://imgur.com/a/PTFfu/zip (old URL format used to be https://imgur.com/gallery/PTFfu/zip).

References