XF 2.2 Settings to keep Imgur attachments forever

[Wildcat Media]

This month, with Imgur removing images that are not tied to an account, I wondered if our image proxy could hold onto these images so we do not have a lot of broken images in forum posts.

In addition to explicit images, Imgur is also removing old and unused photos that are not tied to an account. As a Twitter user noted, Imgur has been used for years to upload photos without an account and post links to different kinds of sites. Removing those images might result in a lot of dead links all over the internet.

Source:

Imgur will ban explicit images on its platform this month

Image hosting platform Imgur has updated its terms and said that it will ban explicit images on its platform from May 15.

techcrunch.com

If I am reading it correctly, our proxy allows us to set 1) an expiration time for proxied images and 2) a way to set the amount of time before the proxy system will try to refresh the image by retrieving it again.

So, if I have my proxy settings adjusted like this:



...is this good enough to preserve the images?

I might also try to find a way to turn images into attachments (via an addon) in the near future but I won't be around until mid May to take on that type of project.

 

[PlayerOne]

Anyone interested in this topic may find this other thread on topic interesting.

XF 2.2 - Proxied imgur images stopped working today

They all look like this now: https://forums.tms.sx/threads/main-character.44874/ What do I do? What's the course of action here?

xenforo.com

Note that as of tonight, many many images seem to be 'gone' from much of the Internet but can still be pulled down via at least some AWS locations.

 

[avalanch]

This is a very important topic and I don't think forum owners are paying enough attention to it. We are just four days away from many Imgur images being deleted and it will affect many of our sites. I am surprised there is not significantly more concern here.



Yes, this will effectively cache the images indefinitely, as you want.

However, as you have guessed, this will only cache images indefinitely from the point in time when you change this setting. Images which were purged from the cache before this time will not be cached indefinitely until they are accessed again.

I have been using this setting since December of 2018 and have nearly 2 million images cached in my image proxy, and I would personally recommend all professional forum owners use this setting unless you have extreme budget limitations. In this case, I'm now going to trust that all of the Imgur images served on my forum over the past five years have been saved by the proxy as expected.



SNIP

So that would be 2 Million + inodes. What hosting plan are you using for hosting that huge amount?

 

[DeltaHF]

So that would be 2 Million + inodes. What hosting plan are you using for hosting that huge amount?

It's a dedicated server. Intel Xeon E-2276G, 64GB RAM, primary 1TB NVMe drive, and a 4TB HDD drive. The 4TB drive used to hold the attachments and Image Proxy files but after using @truonglv's Image Optimizer plugin I was able to compress everything and move them onto the 1TB NVMe drive. (You can see my savings from using the plugin here.)

Current disk usage is 188GB for 1.1m attachments and 169GB for 2.1m image proxy files.

 

[avalanch]

It's a dedicated server. Intel Xeon E-2276G, 64GB RAM, primary 1TB NVMe drive, and a 4TB HDD drive. The 4TB drive used to hold the attachments and Image Proxy files but after using @truonglv's Image Optimizer plugin I was able to compress everything and move them onto the 1TB NVMe drive. (You can see my savings from using the plugin here.)

Current disk usage is 188GB for 1.1m attachments and 169GB for 2.1m image proxy files.

Not too shabby, if you need more savings, jpegmini might be able to do it even further. I use the windows app and it is pretty darn fast.

JPEGmini utilizes perceptual optimization, which means it focuses on reducing the file size while maintaining the perceived visual quality of the image. This involves analyzing the image and identifying areas where certain details can be selectively reduced without significantly impacting the overall visual impression.

AWS Marketplace: JPEGmini (ARM64)

aws.amazon.com