Imgur.com has announced a purge of photos that aren't attached to accounts, beginning 10 days ago. Just recently noticed a lot of their links are no longer working. If users have, or are able to create an account to save images before they're deleted, it could help to save pictures of very rare releases. Often they are used when a full track listing or release year aren't available. Have not looked into creating an account with them yet, but maybe someone has an alternative suggestion.

Here is a search for imgur-uploaded photos within bio/additional information field, where pictures can be saved before they're deleted, and dead links can be replaced/removed:
https://www.metal-archives.com/search/a ... ame=#bands

Same search within release notes:
https://www.metal-archives.com/search/a ... re=#albums

A lot of the recent lyric images in that thread were also saved with this method, and will expire soon unless saved another way.

By the way, Tinypic.com is long dead, there are some dead links in the site, delete them or re-upload them to other sites (if you can find the lost pictures): https://www.metal-archives.com/search/a ... re=#albums
https://www.metal-archives.com/search/a ... ame=#bands

After yesterday's clean-up, there are 380 images that I have saved to the computer, and a list of more that I may be able to retrieve again from the original source that have been lost for the time being. I am wondering what the best way to upload these back to the site will be. Is there some kind of internal function here that would allow for images to be saved so that we don't have to count on a third-party site to maintain them? It's obviously discouraging to see hundreds of useful/rare photos disappear that I no longer have access to and aren't part of the site anymore, some of which had been meticulously straightened and cleaned up. This has happened with image sites that have been used on the site in the past, like photobucket. I'm not sure that getting an account with imgur will be a foolproof solution, since they may just decide not to exist any longer at some random time, and the cleanup that it would cause (like the 9-hour or so one yesterday, which is far from complete) is a massive waste of time, but necessary in order to recover at least a fraction of the pictures that are quickly becoming dead links.

The hassles continue with this, as after re-finding and saving a lot of the images that were lost with imgur's purge, which in itself was time-consuming and not even yet complete, creating an account on imgur so that they won't get deleted for a second time, and beginning to reupload, I keep getting an error message. Maybe just uploaded too many at once - not really sure, but it's pretty sad that with where technology is at nowadays, someone who decides to put the time in to get all of this rare cover art onto the site can't do it without multiple pitfalls, and no suggestions or help is offered at all from people who are probably more savvy with this sort of thing.