Indafotó

» see indafoto.hu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Indafotó opened in 2007 as the Hungarian answer to a problem every national internet had at the time: photographers wanted somewhere to publish work in their own language, and photobloggers wanted an image URL they could paste into a page somewhere else. Indamedia, the group built around Index.hu, ran it. Registered users got unlimited uploads inside a 250 MB monthly allowance, plus control over how their pictures could be used elsewhere.

It became the default. Eighteen years of Hungarian photography accumulated on it, and the number is known precisely because the shutdown notice printed it: 13,641,979 photographs. That is the figure Indamedia published next to the word törlésre, deletion.

The ending ran on a short clock. Uploads stopped working on 1 February 2025. The announcement reached the Hungarian press on 10 March, and the notice on the site read that the service would cease on 31 March 2025 at 24:00, with every one of those 13.6 million images deleted. Users had three weeks to log in and press a single button that packaged their own photographs for download.

That button had a limit worth recording. It returned the image files and nothing else: no titles, and none of the comment threads underneath. What people recovered was pixels, stripped of everything that had made the site a community rather than a folder.

~ the record ~

~ the category, from the outside ~

I know this kind of site well and I never once used this one, which is the ordinary shape of a national photo host. Indafotó was Hungarian at the interface layer and that was all it ever needed to be.

The use case I do recognize is the embed. Around 2007 I had TTNet broadband and the habit, picked up on Turkish forums like donanimhaber and frmtr, of keeping a signature with my hardware list in it. Anything with an image in it needed a host that would serve a hotlinked file and not break next month. That was the job Indafotó did for Hungarian forum users and photoblogs, and every country's internet had its own answer to the same question. Mine was never this one.

~ two endings, four weeks apart ~

The closure has two defensible dates and both are real, which is why registers disagree about it. The operator's own notice names 31 March 2025 at midnight as the end of the service, and that is the date the photographs were deleted and the download window closed.

The website outlived that by a month. The Internet Archive shows indafoto.hu still serving a normal front page of around eleven kilobytes on 10 April and still answering on 23 April. Then on 30 April 2025 every request began returning 401 Unauthorized, and it was still returning 401 in October. ArchiveTeam's Hungarian wiki files that later date. The notice on the corpse named the earlier one, and this grave follows the notice.

~ twenty-one days to crawl it ~

Hungarian archivists moved during the three-week window and ArchiveTeam's Hungarian arm published a guide to browsing what they managed to pull down. It is a partial rescue by construction. A crawler visiting a photo site with 13.6 million images in twenty-one days gets the pages it can reach and misses the long tail of private albums and deep user galleries.

The press coverage that March did the useful thing and led with the instruction rather than the eulogy: save your pictures while you still can. Telex and HWSW both ran that practical advice in the same week, and for the users it was the single most valuable thing anybody published about the closure.

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