The official Imgur blog, with announcements about features like gifv, direct link changes, a data breach, and company news.
HN links it for Imgur product history, especially gifv as an early example of converting GIFs to video, and for the company's policy changes.
I don't remember all the details but imgur used to have some pretty strict limits. iirc you could only upload 250 images on a free account?
I was wrong. It was worse. 75 was the limit for free users. I think I never reached the limit until they upped it to 225.
> In order to get ready for upcoming features, the number of recent images a regular user can have in his/her account has been raised from 75 to 225. Keep in mind that you will still be able to upload more if you go over the limit, it’s just that the older images will be hidden from the account (not deleted!). This is great news, because now you can create even more albums and share all your images at once.
> Also, imgur pro accounts have just been made cheaper! A 1 year imgur subscription is now cheaper than any other comparable photo service, including Flickr, Photobucket and ImageShack. With imgur pro, not only is there no limit to the amount of images you can have in your account, there is absolutely no compression, and your images are not modified in any way if they are under 5MB in size.
https://blog.imgur.com/2010/06/25/imgur-accounts-and-imgur-pro-accounts/
Your parent poster makes the mistake that is rife among Python programmers, which is to assume that in a delightfully simple[0] language like Python, it's "obvious" what a given piece of code does even without explanation. Among people who don't delight in the poor taste of Python's design and have limited exposure to its standard library, of course, it's not always obvious what a given piece of code is doing despite the belief to the contrary, so there are plenty of people who aren't going to pick up on the fact that requests.get doesn't just construct a GET request for the caller, but instead constructs such a request and then goes out and performs it, too.
Shame about the hostile reaction from others towards your question. Keep asking questions (especially things that are presented without comment), and don't be afraid that doing so will make you look stupid or that you should feel like you should be punished for it.
0. https://blog.imgur.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/mocking.jpeg
GIF is just a concept here, but if you upload an animated .gif to just about any large image sharing platform, they will convert it to a video format and serve in a <video> element to save on bandwidth. I'm not sure who was the first to do this, perhaps imgur with their invention of ".gifv" url suffix? [1] However right-click -> save image as... on "gifs" ceased to be an option long ago.
[1] https://blog.imgur.com/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/
https://blog.imgur.com/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/ has some of the details.
It definitely makes sense technically. It should in most cases reduce file size, and also allows you to stream content in buffered so you don't need to wait for the whole thing to load for it to play. (Though I believe streaming in gifs is teeeechnically possible? I feel like I saw a demo one time that made a clock by streaming in gif frames)
While the browser vendors haven't done this - some of the image hosting sites (who are far more directly affected) have.
Imgur automatically converts larger GIF files to "GIFV" (WebM or MP4). The size difference is nuts: their example is a 50MB gif being reduced to 3.5MB
Their announcement post about it:
http://blog.imgur.com/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/
From when it was added: https://blog.imgur.com/2017/06/21/a-new-look-for-direct-links/
The article states that it's been turned back off, but I'm not sure when that edit was. At the very least, here's a report of it happening two months ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/IgnorantImgur/comments/diunko/why_does_imgur_redirect_direct_links/