It’s that time of the year again, Spring cleaning for the internet where yet another keystone website decides that it’s tired of hiding it’s porn from mum and decides to throw the whole lot out. This time it’s Imgur which is purging all it’s NSFW images.

Here’s the exact announcement to their terms and conditions going into effect on May 15 2023. Please be adviced that as with other stuff I have reported in the past, things could change. Onlyfans for example reversed course on it’s porn purge. But it’s business model relies on it a bit more than Imgur, which mainly relies on twitter screenshots, generic redheads, Top Reddit posts and ripped tik tok content.

The Community Rules will now apply to all uploads, both public and hidden. This means the following content is not permitted anywhere on Imgur:

  • Nudity or sexually explicit content.
    • Excludes educational, artistic, and informational content.

Let me tell you, there’s some porn out there that is both educational and artistic, but probably not in the way they’re intending. I didn’t know you could fit that much stuff in one hole! Truly a master craftsman.

Apparently this change is due to a 2019 change they made which hid most NSFW content from the main boards. People could still post NSFW content but it had to be marked private. This two tier society was a bit too confusing to people so imgur is just going “fuck it” and banning the lot because that’s easier for people to understand. 

So what does that mean for artists? Well Imgur is a primary service for images posted to Reddit. Up until 2016 it was the best way to do it. Reddit brought out it’s own image hosting then but prohibited NSFW imagery from being uploaded to the service.\ so NSFW has continued to use imgur as the primary way to post to Reddit. Soooo that means that we’re not just seeing an imgur purge, we’re also going to be getting a reddit purge unless people start finding new options. If you know any better options, or if I’m wrong on any of this, please inform me in the comments!

Reddit’s already got a list of alternatives to imgur for NSFW uploads actually, check it out:

name allows nsfw anon uploads direct links galleries gifs mp4s popups upload limit
freeimage.host yes yes yes yes yes no no 64 mb
imgbox.com yes yes yes yes yes no yes 10 mb
imgchest.com yes yes yes yes yes no no 20 mb
lensdump.com yes no yes yes yes no no 100 mb
pixhost.to yes yes yes yes yes no no 10 mb
redgifs.com yes no no yes yes yes yes 1 gb

This might also effect artists that may have been using Imgur as a portfolio art dump.

Commissioners will also get stung on this one, maybe even harder than artists. I know a couple commissioners who use imgur to organise com details, and dumping OC reference images. To be honest whenever I’ve received coms that are organised via Imgur I always end up getting distracted looking at memes on the sidebar, so I see a net gain on productivity once Imgur has successfully told me and my friends to fuck off.

If you are a commissioner, or are trying to co-ordinate with one I personally recommend hopping on to google drive and sharing a doc with each other. This has the benefit of being hosted just on your own account, and is an active live document that can be fiddled with on the fly as you think of stuff, and since you’re both referencing the same online doc you aren’t in danger of seeing old details by mistake.

I personally find this the most useful method. The second method I most commonly use with commissioners is just pinning their primary details on Discord, and asking them if they think of any other changes just going ahead and editing their original pinned comments. Usually when it comes down to doing the commission I might copy paste the details for myself into a notepad file and whittle it down to bullet points if necessary.

But yeah. No more Imgur. Woo.