プリ画像 (Puri Gazou)

» see prcm.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

プリ画像 was for Japanese girls in middle school and high school, and it was for their phones rather than their computers. The whole product assumed a handset screen and the local habit of treating a standby screen as something you decorate and swap weekly.

The name comes from purikura, the photo-sticker booths, attached to 画像, image. What the site actually did was simple enough to describe in one line: members uploaded 待受画像, standby wallpapers, and everyone else searched them, saved them, and posted more. It launched in 2007 under GMO Media and the Internet Archive has it from 15 December of that year, already running, already in Shift_JIS, already aimed at schoolgirls.

Over time it became the front door of a larger thing. GMO built a teen-girl portal called プリキャン byGMO around it, with a talk service, an advice board, a news site written for teenage readers, and a chat-format fiction app. The news arm published a release in late 2015 saying it had cleared 15 million page views in a single month, and that roughly eight in ten of its readers were teenagers and nine in ten were girls. Those numbers belonged to the portal, not to プリ画像 by itself, but プリ画像 was the thing people arrived for.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

Nothing like this had a Turkish equivalent with the same gravity. We had wallpaper sites in the same years, 2005 onward, mostly scraped galleries of football club crests and film stills with a download counter. What Japan had was a social layer on top: the picture was a post, the post had an author, and saving someone's wallpaper was a small social act rather than a file transfer. That difference is why a wallpaper site stayed alive for seventeen years there and nowhere else.

~ the template they forgot to clean ~

prcm.jp answers 200 today. Under the old mascot logo sits a short white notice saying the service ended at 12:00 on Wednesday 26 June 2024, with an apology for the inconvenience and a thank you to everyone who used it. A banner at the bottom points at プリ小説, the sister fiction app that is still running.

Read the source and it turns out to be corporate boilerplate with the fill-in instructions left in. Three HTML comments survive in the shipped page, all of them addressed to whoever was filling the form. Use the social account block if this service has official accounts. Keep only as many of those icons as you need, delete the areas for accounts you do not have, and delete the site-seal area if it is unnecessary. GMO runs enough services that it keeps a house shutdown page on the shelf, and the person who filled this one in did not strip the notes for the next person who would need it.

~ what survived ~

プリキャントーク and プリキャンニュース died in the same minute, so the portal lost its chat and its editorial arm on one afternoon. プリ小説, the chat-format novel app where readers follow a story told as a fake message thread, was kept. It is the only part of the プリキャン family still trading, and the tombstone for the wallpaper service exists partly to advertise it.

The logo on that notice is dated in its own filename, img-logo-header-2018, a mint-green blob mascot beside the four characters of the name and "by GMO" under them. It has been the last thing on prcm.jp since the summer of 2024, served off the company's own hosting, which is more than most dead Japanese services get.

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