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Comment by Klathmon | Hacker News Reader

This is really off topic, but wow I think imgur is finally unusable on mobile.

I just spend the last couple minutes trying to view that picture and had nothing but issues.

It first opened in the imgur app, but there it only showed a zoomed out preview which I can't just zoom in on, I need to click to open it again larger but then it wouldn't let me zoom past a given point. So I uninstalled the app, re opened the link and it loaded in their web UI, which had the same issue as the mobile (can't zoom enough). I then long pressed the image, opened it in a new tab, had to modify the URL to remove the "fidelity=medium" in the URL, and I could finally view the image in my browser and zoom in on it...

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I don't even try to open imgur links on mobile anymore. For the past month or so, it doesn't even load, I get a black screen. And I refuse to install their app in order to use a website. Same with reddit and Twitter.

Maybe I'm an exception, but smartphones always had terrible usability for me.

Desktop mode fixes imgur on mobile. Unfortunately, that seems to be the only way to do it without manually editing the URL.

Same here. How did they bungle something so simple?

Yea, why not a URL right to the raw image? That technology existed for decades. Image search site results are the same thing: I just want the raw image URL! How could that be so hard?

They don't want people linking directly to the images, they want people linking to the app. They made it difficult to do otherwise on purpose.

If they want people to use their app they should make the app good then so we don't need external links.

One of the nice things about DuckDuckGo vs Google images is they actually link directly to the image when you click on the image part.

There’s a chrome extension to revert Google images to the old behavior. If you can get over the name (Make Google Images Great Again) it’s a really nice and small widget.

Thanks, installed it. I don't care about the name if it does what it says.

Open direct link to 1 image but actually download dozens more, way to kill data plan.

> Image search site results are the same thing: I just want the raw image URL!

For what it's worth, Google removed direct links to images as part of a settlement.

https://9to5google.com/2018/02/09/google-images-features-get...

Because they can't make money off of direct image linking. Monetization is where all the image hosting platforms ended up going bad. Imgur is not too bad but they've added a few features that just make it harder. On desktop, I'm glad you can still just right-click and copy image URL.

I understand they need some ads, but even then it's really easy. The unnecessary ajax-loading and overcomplicated interface did it in. Why is ajax so bad on mobile anyway? Like how the new mobile reddit takes 30 seconds to load on my phone.

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