Pretty wild to click through to the Verge review and all the photo embeds are dead because they were using Lytro's services. Media is so short-lived these days.
The Lytro embeds, unlike physical media (negatives/photos that get lost) could still be revived if Lytro would open source the code. The existing embeds might be dysfunctional, but I would hope the media data could be mirrored (from the Lytro servers) and played via embeds hosted on any server. I'm guessing Lytro photos never reached critical mass for people to really call for this archival effort.
Most webpages don’t have the reach of a mid-sized city newspaper in the 20th century. A few approach the reach of a major city newspaper, wire service like AP or Reuters, or radio/TV network – think about what percentage of the world could hear the BBC! Facebook or Google have those numbers but the vast majority of websites have far fewer visitors and less revenue per reader.
What’s different is that it’s much cheaper. You couldn’t run a printing faculty with a couple of people and laptops but a ton of websites do pull that off.
> The Lytro embeds, unlike physical media (negatives/photos that get lost) could still be revived
This leaves out a lot: if you have physical media, the risk is distributed and has been very well understood for centuries. If my house burns down, you don’t lose your family papers & photos. Important works are widely distributed and there’s rarely a single event which destroys all of them – even things like the Cultural Revolution didn’t manage 100% suppression.
Digital works are easier to make exact copies of but generally worse on every other aspect. In the case of a hosted service like Lytro, the complex proprietary stack is a huge risk but so is something as simple as archiving all of the data – if they’re doing any sort of on-demand loading you run the risk of only downloading the fraction of the data which displays initially without user interaction, and if they’re doing any sort of browser detection or rate-limiting you also have to be careful to deal with those. The web archiving community has years of experience with these kind of issues but it’s expensive and makes it hard for most people to archive their personal data.
If you look at the 1990 circulation numbers, they are small for mid-sized cities, and even for large cities. The NY Times circulation was just over a million, there are hundreds of webpages with that kind of reach now.
They take a little while to load once you click on them; it's dozens and dozens of files.
The data for the embeds may still exist on Lytro's CDN, if you know the UUID for the image, and could be rescued and rehosted. After they shut their hosting service down last year, I crawled every embed the Internet Archive had, and downloaded the additional JSON and JPEG assets necessary to restore the embeds. https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Lytro
Edit: is there a reason why I can't download the torrent? Is it not available as a Torrent anymore?
Also note that I don't think the hosted versions can be imported back into the Lytro Desktop software, if that's what you were hoping for; they're just stacks of JPEGs, JSON metadata, and the depth map data.
Rehosting an individual embed should be pretty straightforward, just replacing the CDN URLs with relative or absolute ones to wherever it's been rehosted (or to Wayback Machine URLs). I'll be writing up some details at some point, but don't wait on me.
Rehosting an entire user's "pictures.lytro.com" gallery was trickier than that, I don't think I was able to get it working locally.
Good luck.