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Comment by segasaturn | Hacker News Reader

Imgur has been lousy for a while, redirecting direct image links to their awful js-heavy reddit clone site. They've been due to be replaced for a while but this will definitely accelerate that.

Also, the irony of the Tumblr comparison is that Tumblr has become my default social image hosting provider now that they allow soft porn and have a paid ad-free subscription. The tables have turned!

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> redirecting direct image links to their awful js-heavy reddit clone site

Are you perhaps copying the wrong thing when trying to share? I've never had this happen. Even copying an image link from their homepage at the time of this post works as expected

https://i.imgur.com/v052wgb.jpeg (some starwars cartoon) or https://i.imgur.com/VT1B7fn.mp4 (some cat with a pineapple)

Maybe you're stuck in some A/B control group type deal, because the same happens to me and the handful of people I've seen accessing imgur while screensharing.

It's not a new development, I believe this has been the case since at least 2016.

If visiting the page directly, we get served a HTML document with a billion resources that loads the image with a comment section beneath it, and includes a sidebar of "related" and "newest in most viral" content.

Possibly even advertisements, but I wouldn't know, as a good friend doesn't let friends browse the internet without an ad blocker.

If I click a link to it, it redirects to the full website. If I go to it directly (or curl it), I get the actual image. Might be referrer-based?

Yes there are ads. They do this so that they can serve ads to people.

I've found this to be inconsistent too. Usually I just get the pic but sometimes it seems to go back to the page? And holy hell is that site heavy for something that should just be showing an image, some navigation and a forum thread.

Someone mentioned caching elsewhere, maybe you're viewing a hotlinked imgur picture in the same browser you use to later visit "the page", so it's cached as a raw image.

You could try opening the URL from a different browser? For example my main use case is clicking "Show Original" on Discord, so when it opens in my browser, the first visit is not in the context of an img tag.

I just tested this by loading a couple of images in Firefox, clearing cache and saved sessions in Edge, and pasting the direct URLs of the image files. Both files loaded the image instead of redirecting to the page. So I dunno whether it's in A/B testing, or they're fingerprinting my system in some cross-browser way, or what.

Anyone from imgur here who can just tell us? :D

I get the redirect on my phone but not on desktop browsers.

Even the i.imgur.com links will redirect when accessed outside an <img> tag. If they don't for you, it's probably due to caching.

Wait, what? How do they even distinguish those cases?

The Accept header tells you whether the browser is expecting a web page or an image.

In fact you can make the page to send you the damn image, and it supposed to be, if you use some extension to modify your user agent and lies to imgur your are using curl something.

Do you know of such an extension? Tumblr and a few other sites do this too and I've been looking for a client side solution for years now

Simple Modify Header

Imgur.com user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)

IMO that along with the Referer header is a mistake or at least the browser should allow you to overwrite that.

Neither of those links are direct for me, they both redirect to imgur.io

Yeah, only works if you've visited that image before.

I have use https://libredirect.github.io/ to get around imgurs stupid redirect nonsesne. It acts as a frontend that can directly load the image on a clean page.

So now I get

https://rimgo.pussthecat.org/v052wgb.jpeg

and

https://rimgo.pussthecat.org/VT1B7fn.mp4

when i click so I can actually load them without all the bs.

Oh, that is weird. I just clicked on the direct links you posted, and it did indeed redirect me to their awful JS-riddled UI. It definitely didn't do that back in the day.

Thanks for the pineapple cat, though. Big fan of that part.

The problem is not the copying, it's a redirect that happens if someone hasn't seen the page image before, they get redirected from the direct image to the page instead.

You first link redirected me to https://imgur.com/v052wgb

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