Imgur TOS change on May 15, 2023 may result in the loss of many media files

Question

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.

Answer 1

These are the failed reuploads at the time Glorfindel's script ran in Movies & TV SE (Image URLs and failure info are from the results of Glorfindel’s script). The list excludes the fixed media — media that have been converted to 2 MiB or less and/or converted to an SE Imgur–compatible format, and then reuploaded and edited into their posts.

As of 2023-05-14, 27 out of the 28 listed media have been fixed. (Good work, everyone!)

The "URL" column leads to the post(s) associated with the media file by linking to the search results in Movies & TV SE of the following query format: url:"https://i.imgur.com/example.gif". If there is no search result, perhaps the media has already been edited out or fixed in their associated post(s).

If you have fixed the media and their associated posts, please remove their respective entries in the table. If there's an issue preventing the fixing of the associated posts, please note it in the "Notes" column of the table. (This post has been made a Community wiki post, so anyone can edit it.)

URL	Failure	Notes
https://i.imgur.com/zeF5lFK.gifv	FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.	can't find an archive copy of the image

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Some notes on converting:

• JPGs > 2 MiB can be made ≤ 2 MiB by saving them at a lower quality. Some image editing software, such as Irfanview, have a 'set file size' JPG conversion functionality. Setting it at 2048 KiB (= 2 MiB) should work.

• PNGs > 2 MiB can usually be made ≤ 2 MiB by saving them to JPG. Setting quality = 95 usually works.

• Imgur GIFV videos also have a GIF version in a similar URL pattern. E.g., https://i.imgur.com/example.gifv → https://i.imgur.com/example.gif

• GIFs > 2 MiB are a bit trickier to edit. Using a GIF optimizer such as ezgif.com or Gifsicle, it may be possible to lessen its filesize to ≤ 2 MiB by doing one or more of the following: lossy GIF compression, resizing it to have lower resolution (SE only shows 650px max width on embedded images), color reduction to reduce to 128 colors, and cutting its frames in half by removing every 2nd frame then slowing it down to 50% to get back to previous speed.

• Another alternative is to archive the post using services such as: Internet Archive Wayback Machine and archive.today, so that the images in it can be edited back later. Note that this will only archive the image if it is embedded into the post. If it is linked but not embedded into the post you will need to archive the original Imgur URL, e.g., https://i.imgur.com/example.gif.