Imgur Policy Change (2023)......

[Smokey]

Just a heads up...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3vkq/the-imgur-apocalypse-is-going-to-break-large-parts-of-the-internet

I wonder how much storage would be needed to keep a local copy of any forum images currently hosted on Imgur? 

[alm]

Another illustration why it's best to upload images to the forum as attachment rather than a third-party image hosting site. Unfortunately the limits on size and number of attachments sometimes make this painful.

[MrMobodies]

It’s not just porn that’s getting deleted from Imgur. Millions of images that are embedded elsewhere will also eventually be taken down.

I have foreseen that this might happen so I tried to do both (inline link to imgur and attach in message) when the forum's inline feature stopped working.

[NiHaoMike]

There's a community project to save the data.
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Imgur

[DW1961]

You can also use https://gifyu.com/

and it's easier to use than imagur.

https://gifyu.com/
 
TERMS

Image Storage

All image uploaded by our registered users under their account are stored for lifetime free. While images uploaded as guest will be removed exactly after one year. However, images which are not confirming to our terms of service will be removed immediately.
Image Bandwidth

All images directly viewed on our website will have unlimited bandwidth without any restrictions. While we allow hot-linking, images consuming more than 100GB hot-linking bandwidth within a week will be temporally taken down.

[PlainName]

All image uploaded by our registered users under their account are stored for lifetime free.

Much easier said than done. Unless there is a significant penalty to them for breaching that, there is no reason to think it might last beyond next week.

[tom66]

Sad news, Imgur is off my list of websites to trust.  Funny how they started as an alternative to other "evil" photo sharing sites with significant restrictions.

[rsjsouza]

All image uploaded by our registered users under their account are stored for lifetime free.

Much easier said than done. Unless there is a significant penalty to them for breaching that, there is no reason to think it might last beyond next week.

Indeed. Quite a number of original image hosts are long gone, succumbed to the weight of the financial reality. When it hits, the terms are simply changed or the company folds.

I like there are initiatives to keep such images free outside of the original content provider, but even the internet archive/wayback machine is falling prey to the justice system and the publisher's copyright claims.

It becomes a whack-a-mole game, unfortunately.