imgh.us

» see imgh.us as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Every image host of the 2000s took JPEG and PNG, usually GIF, and then stopped. If what you had was a vector file, you were on your own. SVG is text, technically, and text can contain script, so a host accepting SVG was accepting a small security problem on behalf of every visitor who would ever open one. The rational business decision was to refuse, and essentially all of them did.

imgh.us refused to refuse. It had been running since at least June 2007, when somebody recommended it on an Inkscape forum, and the recommendation was about exactly this: here is a place that will take your .svg and your .svgz. That one sentence is most of why the site existed for a decade. Imgur was always going to win on everything else; imgh.us just happened to be the only address a particular kind of person could use at all.

By the end it was holding 699,927 images. That number is not an estimate from a press release. The homepage printed its own count, and the last time anyone read it was 11:10 UTC on 8 September 2017, which happened to be the morning the site was scheduled to close.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ seven weeks' notice ~

The announcement went up on 21 July 2017 and it is unusually plain for the genre. "Due to things that happened in recent months this site is shutting down and the domain will expire on September 8th, you have until then to download your images that are hosted on here and find them a different host." Uploading would be turned off two weeks early, on 25 August.

Two details in that are worth keeping. The first is that the stated cause is a domain registration lapsing, which almost nobody admits to in writing; the usual phrasing is a strategic decision or an exciting new chapter. The second is the uploading cutoff. Switching off new uploads two weeks before the end is a small courtesy that costs the operator nothing and saves a stranger from putting a file somewhere that will be gone in a fortnight. Whoever ran this site thought about that.

~ the night of the ninth ~

The Wayback Machine caught the handover to the minute. Through 8 September the homepage answers all day at around 2,340 bytes, crawled over and over as people watched it. At 01:10:55 UTC on 9 September the server returns a 404. Six minutes later, at 01:17:14, it is answering again at 721 bytes. The page that replaced the site is the best thing about this whole story, so here is all of it: "Imgh.us is no longer an image hosting website. If you are coming here because your images don't work anymore, you can still download your images from http://thevid9.com/img_hoster/images2/[image_name] for the next week, folder will be gone on September 16th."

Read that again. The operator, who was closing the site because he could not keep paying for the domain, copied the entire image library onto a different address he still controlled and left it reachable by direct filename for another eight days. There was no index and no search. If you knew what your file was called you could still go and get it. That is somebody doing unpaid work for strangers on the way out the door.

Then it came back properly. On 14 September the site itself was online again and the images were reachable, which means somebody paid for something, or a registrar grace period did the work. That reprieve was not permanent and nobody announced its end either. At some point the server stopped serving files, and by 25 December 2017 the address returned an empty directory listing. The domain today answers as a redirect into a PNG conversion tool with no connection to any of this.

~ what 699,927 files were doing there ~

Archive Team got to this one, logged it under an ArchiveBot job, and marked the result rescued, which is a better outcome than most of the hosts on this site managed. What they saved is a snapshot of a decade of other people's working files.

Because that is the real character of an SVG host. Nobody uploads a vector file to show their friends. They upload it because they are in the middle of something. A logo draft on its way to a client, or a diagram that had to go into a forum answer where only a link would fit. Ten years of half-finished work, parked at an address that somebody kept renewing until the year they did not.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »