I've been using imgur to host images basically since waffleimages died (I think like 2011?) and imgur seemed poised to become the next waffleimages. It has its issues: for a long time, it's been a pain to download images because they try to funnel users into their bizarre social network. But for simply hosting images on a page, it always seemed reliable.
I was looking back at my Flow review & analysis post and discovered to my horror that all of the images have been removed. I've already fixed it, but you can have a look at the original post on bearblog to see the damage.
My first thought was that there was some sort of copyright takedown by Janus Films, which didn't make much sense: the images I used were perfectly fair use in the context of my review, and I have no idea why my tiny blog would be on their radar. Then I remembered that I also used an image from Final Fantasy X, so Squaresoft would've had to file a simultaneous takedown, and what are the odds of that?
Then I remembered that the post also had a photo of my cat, which I took with my own camera. Friends, they even removed the photo of my cat. It was then that I realized this was a 100% vindictive act by imgur against me, for having the gall to use their service. Apparently the minuscule bandwidth of ~100 views that post has generated over the last 90 days was a grave transgression, and I needed to be dealt with.
I googled around and learned that imgur announced in 2023 that they were going to start deleting "old, inactive content". I was unaware of this, but that's it. They're done. This kills the website. If I can't trust that images I upload will be there later, they're no longer a service. But that's neither here nor there, because my post isn't 6 months old yet, and I have older posts where the images remain up (for now.) I'm not sure why they had it out for that post in particular.
The even removed photo of my cat. Think about it. They deleted a cat picture from the internet. Unhinged behavior. Thank goodness I also posted it on fedi, otherwise it may have been lost forever.
My next move is to try to back up images from as many of my old posts as possible. Just save them locally until I figure out what alternative to use. The Flow post only had a handful of fairly low-res images, so I just moved them to my web hosting. It shouldn't cost me too much.
To be honest, this was probably a long time coming. Imgur-hosted pictures don't show up properly in the wayback machine snapshots, and I worry people might not to be able to see them in some RSS clients. I just didn't know what alternative to use. I've seen people recommend catbox.moe, but in my experience it's fairly slow and unreliable, and it seems to be blocked by a large number of countries and ISPs. 0x0.st is good, but its storage is temporary by design. Images should at least show up properly in the wayback snapshot, but I don't want readers to have to rely on that for every post over a year old. I think some corporate shuggoths like google drive and github allow hotlinking, but I'd have to figure out a good workflow.
I guess for now I'll just host everything locally and figure out an alternative if/when it becomes a problem. Truth be told, even when I was using >100MB of bandwidth a day in needless RSS traffic, it was barely making a dent in my hosting bill. I'm just trying to think about the future. I want this site to be around for years and years, and I want it to be sustainable. I don't want to be caught off-guard if, a few years from now, my site gets an influx of traffic and I'm suddenly transferring gigabytes of images which rapidly drains my account balance.
It sucks that this still isn't a solved problem in 2025, and I'm starting to understand the appeal of a return to text-only services like gopher and gemini. When it's this much of a logistical headache, "learn how to be happy without images" is a philosophy I'm increasingly sympathetic towards.