TinyPic
| Tinypic | |
| |
 TinyPic's homepage as it appeared on August 31, 2019, after uploads were disabled. | |
| URL | http://www.tinypic.com/ |
| Status | Offline |
| Archiving status | Partially saved |
| Archiving type | Unknown |
| Project source | tinypic-grab |
| Project tracker | tinypic |
| IRC channel | #archiveteam-bs (on hackint) (formerly #tinydick (on EFnet)) |
TinyPic was a photo and video sharing service, owned and operated by Photobucket[1], that allowed users to upload, link and share, images and videos on the Internet. An account was not required to use TinyPic, and it was generally the de facto site to quickly upload images to link elsewhere before Imgur's rise. TinyPic shut down in September 2019.
Images and videos
TinyPic allows the upload and hosting of JPEG (jpg), png, gif, and tiff files. Images that are larger than 1600 pixels (either in width or height) are automatically resized to the largest acceptable size while maintaining their original aspect ratio. The site requires a CAPTCHA to be filled in each time an image is uploaded.
TinyPic does not accept standard-definition video files which are larger than 500 Megabytes in size or longer than 15 minutes in length. Videos longer than 15 minutes are truncated to 15 minutes. Users can also upload high definition videos as long as they are no larger than 500 Megabytes in size and no longer than 5 minutes in length. TinyPic officially accepts the uploading of videos in the following video formats: 3g2, 3gp, 3gp2, 3gpp, 3p, asf, avi, divx, dv, dvx, flv, moov, mov, mp4, mpe, mpeg4, mpeg, mpg4, mpg, qt, rm, wmv, and xvid and generally users are able to upload all but the most unusual formats.
TinyPic deletes images and videos that are not associated with a user account and that have not been viewed for 90 days. TinyPic will sometimes reuse URLs of deleted images, resulting in old image links showing unintended content.
Shutdown announcement
The shutdown of TinyPic was announced in July 2019 due to declining usage (and declining ad revenues that followed).
TinyPic is shutting down[IA•Wcite•.today•MemWeb]
Due to an inability to support a high-quality free digital service that derives 100% of its revenue from ever declining on-site revenues, TinyPic will be permanently shutting down on September 16, 2019. Because we want to give you as much notice and information as possible during our transition, please carefully review the following information.
What Should You Do Now?
If you have a TinyPic user account, login and download all of the images you wish to preserve. Sorry, bulk download is not an option on TinyPic so you will need to download each image separately.
IMPORTANT DATES:
August 20, 2019 - no new images may be uploaded on TinyPic.
August 29, 2019 - hosted images will no longer be viewable on 3rd party websites. Because we are an anonymous hosting site and therefore cannot provide notice by e-mail to our users, we have opted to replace all hosted images with a temporary message directing them to this notice.
September 16, 2019 - last day for TinyPic account holders to access their accounts and download their images.
We would like to personally thank you for choosing TinyPic as your hosting service. Many of you have been utilizing our services since we launched back in April 2004. As you look for a new hosting service, please consider selecting one of the premium plans offered by our sister site, Photobucket.
Below this notice was a recommendation to subscribe to Photobucket's premium service.
It was noticed on September 5th that the total shutdown deadline was moved forwards to September 9th. On the 9th, the message was changed again to indicate that hotlinking from third party sites was disabled but images could still be accessed through the TinyPic website until the 16th. The servers finally stopped serving data on the 19th sometime between 17:45 and 18:55 UTC.
Archival
TinyPic's servers were very slow and easily overwhelmed, which rendered a complete archival impossible.
A warrior project was running slowly from late August to the shutdown, scanning all possible combinations of image code and silo. It only managed to cover roughly 1 % of those combinations. The data from this project can be found in this collection.
Another crawl was run by User:JustAnotherArchivist using a different method, namely following links from an image page to other images. About 13.2 million images were found and retrieved this way, though the number of actually successful retrievals of all resources is somewhat lower (because the crawl ignored repeated failures on the same URL after a while and still treated it like a success). This data is in the items tinypic.com_images_201909_a, tinypic.com_images_201909_b, tinypic.com_images_201909_c, and tinypic.com_images_201909_d.
References
| Expandv · t · e Archive Team |
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