We've found ALL THE PHOTOS

[blackcherry]

They're always in the last place you look...


This is a bit of a suprise to us, but a delightful one. The Admin Team were recently exploring the unnamable parts of the server (some may call them the Chaos Wastes...) looking for images from before the crash and found something bette than we had ever hoped - all of the site's images from before the crash.

Now we can't promise it's exactly every image, but there are some odd 90,000 pictures, so I hope you'll forgive us if we can't be perfectly precise.

Now, because we had to rebuild the site from scratch, the database doesn't know where all the photos need to go so they won't be restored automatically to everyone's galleries. But the images will be available for everyone. How we release them is up to you all so please vote above.

Not sure what to say other than I'm elated and really excited. I hope everyone shares our feelings.

Here is a preview of some of the images we've found so far - more are to come.











blackcherry and TRNG

[Colonel Jacka]

Can they be restored to the threads or not?

[shabbadoo]

If restoring everything to its proper place is too brutal a task to even contemplate, just put the pics in properly sub-sectioned galleries and people can then hunt through them and re-link pics in their threads, if they wish. Should be manageable for the admins to do this (given a good amount of time- grab a coffee or fifty, pick a sub-section, and just get stuck in on it), and everyone will have access. Anyone with a few hundred links in a thread that doesn't want to re-link them all can just post a link to the proper sub-section/page where the appropriate pics can be found. That's enough work for the admins as it is, and it is not too much to ask the community to wipe its own butt after they have been provided the paper.

[Lord Damocles]

How would releasing them in batches work?

Presumably they're going to have to be really large batches, otherwise it would take ages until they were all available?

[Teh Real New Girl]

Thanks Jacka and Shabbadoo.

The issue is ... apart from it being a MAMMOTH task is that the pics don't have proper names any more so it's a case of people looking through and recognising their own photos and yes then relinking them.

Also, it's a huge task because the images aren't just in one big file but in a complicated file structure that each image has to be picked out of individually and then renamed as an image file. So huge work for us but we are more than happy....yay thrilled.... to do it.

But that's where we need the help of all the community to pull together and help us rename and relabel the pics. Are you up for it folks? *grabs a coffee*

[Colonel Jacka]

Thanks for the info. I think I've settled for them being lost in the warp.

[Captain Brown]

This is great news.

CB

[Urgat]

Well I'm up for identifying my own pics. Beyond that, can't see how I could be of help...

[benvoliothefirst]

I don't have a horse in this race, since I host on Google (pairs nicely with Picasa) but I feel like all this would be a ton of work for the mods. If people don't have their own backups of their images I think it's reasonable to say they have to sift through the photos in one big pile and find the ones they need. Great opportunity to trim the fat!

#alwaysbackup

I've always found that it's better to have pics offsite anyway, so they show up full-size in threads without having to click through.

[Captain Brown]

I vote for one big batch. We may even have members who recognize their friends and fellow members photos.

My two cents,

CB

[New Cult King]

Do you think this might include avatars? I miss my old noddy smiley sun and the original image was saved on an old HDD of mine that is well dead and gone now.

[Karak Norn Clansman]

Most of it dead now, courtesy of Photobucket...

[Denny]

Most of it dead now, courtesy of Photobucket...

Ah man, this is superlame. I can't decide whether I should try and rehost and update all my photos or just give up on my plog.
Either way, they sure as %$£" ain't getting $400 out of me . . .

How do other people host their images?

[Ash]

I'm re loading my images to http://imgur.com currently free and works. Not sure about storage size or bandwidth...

[Kisanis]

So any news of this? I think many of us are more than happy to trawl through and add links to pics we recognize.

Sent from my LG-H831 using Tapatalk

[Noble Korhedron]

Agreed; this seems to have been abandoned, and I can't understand why....

[Captain Brown]

Well we will try to get it going again.

Cheers,

CB

[Teh Real New Girl]

We have been releasing photos into albums by myself and black cherry into albums called lost and found. There's also another thread in WarSeer news about this.

It's a very labour intensive process whereby each image or text file has to be retrieved from a very complicated and random file system and then recreated as an image file and then saved. It takes over 15 minutes per image so you can imagine what an undertaking this is. Quite a few images have been recovered and put into the albums so far but as yet we've had no community engagement or feedback on them.

This would be appreciated as it's a mammoth task but we want to do it for the community members and because we promised.



TRNG

[TheBigBadWolf]

Any, emm, cough, wastes pics?

[Teh Real New Girl]

Any, emm, cough, wastes pics?

Quite a lot actually. Would you prefer them all in one folder??