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The top answer to this question contains two links to images on imgur.com. Both are marked as

The image you are
requesting does not exist
or is no longer available

imgur.com

Both of the images had previously been archived on archive.org, so they certainly did exist in 2021. (The answer to this question was posted in 2015.) The links on imgur.com certainly do not exist now.

I thought that the purpose of going to i.stack.imgur.com was to drastically reduce link rot for imagery. I know that several of my older answers where I naively used non-imgur.com links have suffered from image link rot. People have nicely rescued those older answers by diligently finding the sources and switching the images to i.stack.imgur.com links.

If we had a "what the bleep" tag, I would have used that. We don't, so instead I used and .

After a bit more sleuthing, the Q&A in question was captured by the WayBack Machine (archive.org), here. This links to an August 2022 capture, which portrays the images properly. The images were deleted from imgur.com sometime between August 2022 and April 2023. The images are small, so certainly are not over the size limit. Note that the April 2023 capture (which shows the link rot problem) predates the May 15 2023 change to the imgur.com TOS.

As an aside, I was in the process of answering yet another question on the analemma, so I looked for related questions and answers.

What the bleep is going on here?

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    $\begingroup$ I was one of the few user who took initiative in fixing the old posts. Here is one example where I removed the markup "doesn't exist" because there was already a video linked to the answer and I assumed the screenshot were from the video, so I removed them. In this case, I didn't knew what is the image and what image it could replace with. So, it was left as it is. $\endgroup$
    – Nilay Ghosh
    Commented Feb 2 at 4:34
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    $\begingroup$ @NilayGhosh The image links you deleted were on i.imgur.com -- the OP anonymously uploaded the images to imgur and used Markdown to insert those anonymous images into the page view. Imgur aggressively prunes anonymous images that are rarely referenced and whose last reference is old. The images in the Q&A I referenced are at i.stack.imgur.com -- the answerer properly used the stackexchange image upload capabilities, so those images should not rot. But they did rot. $\endgroup$
    – David Hammen
    Commented Feb 2 at 11:47
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    $\begingroup$ This isn't great. The problem might be specific to this set of images, but there's an outside chance it's related to the changes to SE's image hosting arrangement, so I'm going to add the status-review tag so it gets escalated to staff. $\endgroup$
    – HDE 226868 Mod
    Commented Feb 3 at 1:02
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    $\begingroup$ @HDE226868 After even more sleuthing, I suspect that the copyright owner of the image may have issued a DMCA takedown order to imgur.com. The images in question are copyrighted and the copyright owner appears to be very proud of those photographs. In the photographers own words, "more men have walked on the moon than have successfully photographed the analemma." $\endgroup$
    – David Hammen
    Commented Feb 3 at 7:12
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    $\begingroup$ Just to add, the copyright owner (Anthony Ayiomamitis) is very, very proud of his work, and his analemma photographs in particular: perseus.gr/Astro-Copyright.htm. "There is copyright on all of my images and unauthorized use is strictly prohibited!" $\endgroup$
    – David Hammen
    Commented Feb 3 at 7:26
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    $\begingroup$ @DavidHammen Ah, interesting -- that makes a lot of sense. $\endgroup$
    – HDE 226868 Mod
    Commented Feb 6 at 23:49
  • $\begingroup$ Related? We've got at least 26 generic i.imgur.com image links that might break on May 15, 2023; should/could they be updated to i.stack.imgur.com? $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Commented Apr 17 at 22:17
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    $\begingroup$ @uhoh Kinda related. I suspect the image I flagged was subject to a DMCA takedown. Images posted on i.stack.imgur.com are not protected by the fact that they are under stack ownership but are still subject to DMCA takedowns. OTOH, imgur.com can take down those generic images any time they want for any reason they want. $\endgroup$
    – David Hammen
    Commented Apr 19 at 9:42

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