Where have all the images gone?

Diamonds may be forever, but the internet certainly isn’t. Especially its images, which are often hosted on third-party websites that can choose to delete them at any time.

Case in point: Last month, an image hosting platform called Imgur announced a plan to delete “old, unused, and inactive content” from its site by May 15.

This is a big problem for Something Awful, the 25-year old online community (!) full of Imgur hosted images. According to many, Something Awful is responsible for popularizing much of the visual language you see on today’s internet, including memes like the Slender Man and I-Can-Haz-Cheezeburger Cat.

But now, unless one particular heist-like mission results in success, there’s a chance that content could go away forever. (Though is a cheeseburger loving cat really a historical artifact? The team at Something Awful certainly thinks so.)

• After hearing the Imgur news, a group of Something Awful members began downloading all of the Imgur content before it was potentially deleted.
• Dubbed the “Great Imgur Download Caper,” Something Awful’s heist-like mission has largely worked – they’ve secured a roughly three-terabyte collection of pictures and short videos to date. The go-forward plan is for the group to host all of the images on its own servers, then update the site to point to the new image locations.

📸 Zoom out: This incident speaks to a broader question facing the internet of today: what happens when the lights go off, and how do we preserve the internet as we know it? Because our archival track record doesn’t look so hot: roughly 7 million of the internet’s first websites were wiped when Yahoo! bought and subsequently shuttered GeoCities in 2009.