Vanishing Pictures

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I noticed earlier today that a large number of pictures which I posted to a couple of threads over the last few months have disappeared. Some however are still there. The threads in question are both in the 'Television, Film and Video' section and are entitled 'TV episodes you have just watched' and 'Post a pic of a car from a TV show or movie you saw recently'. In addition, a few pictures that were missing a few hours ago seem to have returned.

All the pics are hosted on the 'Postimages' site, so maybe the problem is at that end. I'd be interested to hear whether anyone else is experiencing something of this sort, and if so, what hosting site do you use? If pictures originating from multiple sites are affected, then it's more likely that the issue is at the WP end.

Could be an issue with the isp updating their database. I'm only guessing but if it is this it's just a case of waiting for this to happen or to clear the cache yourself.

I had a similar problem a few weeks ago with my work website. I actually turned cloudflare on on my devices and that seemed to fix the issue.

If some vanish and then reappear, and only for a Postimage source, it seems the problem is at their end.
I checked your posts to "TV Episodes You Have Just Watched" back to August and every post you make referencing an image(s) displays them Ok. Or at least for now.

Do you see a blank page, an error message, or just the word "Image" where the image should be?

That "Image" one is annoying (always with Twitter-sourced images) and seems to be Firefox specific, despite opening up my usual script/tracking measures. In Vivaldi, even with the same script/tracking measures left active, everything's fine.

Thanks for the replies. I tried clearing the cache on Google Chrome, but most of the images are still absent in the lower half of page 4 of the 'cars' thread, for example. Firefox seems to be similarly affected.

Cornflake, are those page 4 car images visible on your PC?

Yes, it's the word 'image' phenomenon that I'm getting.

Try going into settings and turning on cloudflare

Thanks, I'll look into that!

Yeah that defo looks like it's to do with your isp.

Yep, all present and correct.

Ah, that one's a bugger.
See how it is with Vivaldi: https://vivaldi.com/

I'm seriously considering moving to it, if only because in incorporates many useful things I could do with Firefox extensions before the developers made them incompatible.

Ah, not quite what I meant - that's the usual "The link to the image is broken" display. What I mean is literally, just the word "Image" displayed on its own.

I'm getting all your images showing DeepHour

BREAKING NEWS: So am I, everything apparently back to normal now on my PCs, without any actions on my part.

Oh well, thanks the two of you for your help and interest!!

Yay

Excellent.

Temporary routing issues somewhere between you and the Postimages site, now resolved.
That would also explain the "broken link" icon you were seeing.

Just as an afterthought, is there a compelling reason, technical or otherwise, why images have to be routed to the forums here via a third party hosting site? Wouldn't it be a more straightforward and reliable system if they could be directly uploaded? After all, members' avatars can be uploaded directly, can they not?

If you look at a lot of threads from several years ago, you will see that almost all the images which once adorned many posts are now inaccessible, presumably because the hosting sites have updated their software, or maybe even gone out of business.

This question has probably been raised on numerous occasions over the years, but I think it's still of interest.

It comes down to one thing: storage space.

It's a paid-for resource, but by linking to an image hosted on another site that carries the cost instead. Those sites often provide other image-related services beyond simply hosting them.

Avatars are tiny so can be accommodated easily, but many of the images posted here are quite large and as imaging tech has dramatically improved over the years, they're only getting larger.

Many of the older threads are no longer displaying the images posted because the hosting account has been closed by the poster - most of mine have vanished because of that.
If that's the case there's usually a hosting site -related icon noting that the account has been closed or the image removed. If the hosting company itself has vanished then there would just be "broken link" icons displayed, as with your earlier issue.

I was paying for a service which over time, became superseded by the free services and while it was technically possible to transfer all my images from one site to another and correct the posts, "ain't nobody got time for that".
Also members generally wouldn't be able to do much with this because they don't have the "eternal" post editing privileges of a moderator.

Another thing that can happen that I came across years ago, is that if you are linking to an image on a private website, the owner may take a dislike to paying for the extra traffic to their server and do a switcharoo with the image, replacing it with a very NSFW image of the same file name, typically as obscene as they can find! Potentially getting the innocent member on WP into bother with the mods. So best to never just link to a private site, but not sure how realistic that is, as folks often link to images found on Google images, which are from private websites, but don't know if that uses a Google cache of said images or goes back to the original website for them. What do you think Cornflake? I suppose that even if from a Google cache, Google may still refresh back to the original website images anyway periodically when the site is scanned by Google... again resulting in NSFW images getting through..