Imgur announced new Terms of Service that will go into effect on May 15, 2023, with one of the changes being:
removing old, unused, and inactive content that is not tied to a user account
Related Meta SE post about this: Imgur TOS change on May 15th 2023 could cause the loss of thousands of Stack Exchange images!
Note that the TOS change only applies to media uploaded at https://imgur.com/ (URL: i.imgur.com
), not to images uploaded in an SE site (URL: i.stack.imgur.com
).
This Imgur TOS change affects a large number of media files that are linked to or embedded in Movies & TV SE posts. The post authors either did not upload the media to SE Imgur, the media exceeded 2 MiB (the maximum size allowed by SE Imgur), or the media was in a format unsupported by SE Imgur, such as MP4, GIFV, or WEBP (SE Imgur only allows JPG, PNG, and GIF).
The good news is that most of these images have been successfully reuploaded to SE Imgur.
This is thanks to Glorfindel’s efforts — you can read more details on their Meta SE post at: Imgur TOS change on May 15th 2023 could cause the loss of thousands of Stack Exchange images!
Note: Glorfindel’s script currently has not yet fixed any posts but has only reuploaded images. I’d follow their answer at the relevant Meta SE post for updates on whether it will fix the posts. Based on what Glorfindel wrote, it seems that it would need the help of SE staff to mass edit all the affected posts in the SE network. The Meta SE post has been marked status-review, so the affected posts are likely to be fixed soon. Therefore, there’s no need to manually fix posts or reupload the associated images that have already been uploaded by Glorfindel’s script.
However, some media could not be reuploaded to SE Imgur
…because they exceeded SE Imgur's 2 MiB file size limit, were in unsupported formats, or have been deleted from Imgur. In Movies & TV SE, there are 28 failed reuploads to SE Imgur (link leads to the results of Glorfindel's script). We could focus our efforts on editing those images (or looking for copies/alternatives if they've been deleted) to fit SE Imgur's requirements.