I find many images posted in the forum are vanishing.
Any ideas on why and how to restore them?
in your example, @jimhami42 may have used linked images, as opposed to uploaded…
links can break, but uploads should be persistent…
a lot of people use links…
john
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I noticed this quite a while ago …
I almost always cut and paste images directly into the post … on occasion I’ll upload a photo. However, I almost never link to images.
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looks like all of them linked to resp. located at:
https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/sketchup/uploads/default/????/UID.png
which is simply broken… maybe because the disk quota of the booked service package is reached?
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Same here, I doubt that I have posted a link to an image since we moved to Discourse.
I don’t think the missing image problem is link rot, unlike the multitude of broken links to Help pages.
Hmm, sort of like someone forgot to put more coins in the parking meter?
It would be nice if these could be recovered. Most of my pix are screen captures that I cut and pasted into the posts … I never bothered to save a copy 
Maybe it’s a coincidence, but a lot of images on Facebook are broken today too.
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Sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence … this is one of them 
There are reports of WhatsApp and Instagram also not showing images at the moment. See for example:
https://downdetector.com/status/whatsapp
Same for Facebook:
https://downdetector.com/status/facebook
In fact, just look at the graphs on this page:
If all of those sites, including Twitter too, are having the same problem at the same time, I can imagine it affecting this forum too.
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With all due respect, @colin, I noticed that many of my images disappeared several months ago. I don’t see how that’s related to any outages occurring today …
As @SketchUp3D_de pointed out, these are linked to discourse storage:
https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/sketchup/uploads/default/6201/e0a21cc1d080945d.png
https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/sketchup/uploads/default/6200/374c8e1d8d5d23a6.png
I agree there can be two similar issues at the same time, and old images having gone a while ago is probably a different thing. I’m really just talking about how all images have gone away from the forum, just this morning.
All the sites that were having image problems are back, including the forum. As Jim says, that could still just be a coincidence. You can see the graphs recovering:
I took a picture to show how many of the big names were affected at the same time, because the link I gave is real time, and won’t make sense for future viewers! Of course, I have to hope that my picture will show up…
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Back to the OP’s original question … is there any possibility that the missing images will be restored?
Is some of this discussion related?:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/disable-cdn-causes-old-images-with-cdn-url-can-not-be-shown/29657
I’ll check with @jody to see if he has ideas too.
It would appear to be related … the time-frame is about right. Somewhere along that time the format went from something like this:
<img src="https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/sketchup/uploads/default/5942/45584ff555dc9f00.png" width="690" height="411">
to something like:
<a class="lightbox" href="https://global.discourse-cdn.com/sketchup/original/2X/b/b77d7f7c22902faa2ccdfcc4169dfa2abe7355a3.png data-download-href="https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/sketchup/uploads/default/b77d7f7c22902faa2ccdfcc4169dfa2abe7355a3" title="tux.png" rel="nofollow noopener">
I guess my images were only half-baked 
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Thanks for looking at that, and sorry for my jumping on the bigger problem that came up that day. I will definitely help with the Discourse specific issues.
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Perhaps @sam knows what’s going on and how to restore the missing images.
We’re losing a lot valuable posts.
Example
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Sadly this was one of the impacted images we were not able to recover.
..../default/3883/eba4377ca87f1c0d.png is the old fragile scheme.
We have backups but the only extend 2 months and this issue crept in about 6-12 months ago.
We did a ton to make sure this issue never happens again:
-
We added a regular job that double checks uploads we “think” we have we “actually” have by running an inventory on s3
-
We amended our markdown format to a far less fragile format where uploads are always specifies in a much stronger format. Eg images are now
which is far easier for us to map back to actual images. HTML also now includes a ref to the image hash. -
We spent an enormous amount of time attempting to recover stuff from google and wayback machine
- We fixed wayback machine so it now works with discourse.
Sadly, this does not fix the history, I am very sorry this has happened on some of the oldest posts here but there is not much we can do.
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