Hello, my cranky friends! This diary is a follow-up to one I posted early this past week: Cranky Users: Great News for the Image-Bereft. You can refer to that diary if you want WAY more detail. But here’s what I’m on about today:
This is about a time in 2019 when, because of a legal threat to the site, all the Image Library contents uploaded through 2015 (from its beginning in 2012) had to be removed. They were not discarded, just impounded, and there was supposed to be a way you could reclaim your images, but that never worked for a lot of people. (You can already see that, if you didn’t join Daily Kos until after 2015, you don’t need to worry about this.)
Fast-forward to kos’s recent announcement about Daily Kos moving to a WordPress platform. In that comment thread, someone asked about the impounded images. Upon checking, kos found they still existed, and agreed to restore them to people who asked, but on a very short timeline, just a few days. I am charged with collecting the signup list to get those old images back.
The original, very firm deadline kos set for signing up was this past Friday! That made me sad because I felt like a lot of people who stop in on weekends, and in particular some photo-heavy groups that post only on weekends, would be left out. So on Friday, I thought to ask. And, good news: by “the deadline is Friday”, he really meant “this has to be ready to go on Monday morning”. That’s a very different thing for those of us who do not work here!
So: if you missed all this during the week, here is your chance. If you were uploading images to the then-new Image Library before 2016, and you would like to recover those images, which you lost in 2019, please leave a comment below BY 11:59 PM PDT ON SUNDAY, AUG. 10.
If you were still exclusively using an outside image host like Flickr or Photobucket at that time, then you didn’t lose those images — they are presumably still out there at that host. Nothing was automatically imported to Daily Kos when the Image Library came online, so if you didn’t upload anything yourself, it didn’t happen.
If you are not sure how to tell if you lost images here, do this:
Open a comment (or diary draft). Click the image library button in the toolbar (rightmost button, little mountain with sun/moon), and then click on the “My Images” button. Scrollllllll down in your images, and when you reach the earliest ones, any removed images you have will show a gray box with “image removed” and a little crossed-out camera. If you click on one of them, you can still see whatever meta-data you entered, such as the file name and description, which you can use to decide if it’s anything worth getting back. And if you don’t see any of those, you don’t have any images that were hosted here but impounded in the 2019 action.
And yes, we have confirmed that it is okay to ask on behalf of someone else. No one likes to see hollowed-out photo diaries or comments, especially from someone who no longer posts here or perhaps has passed away. Many community favorites have already been listed thanks to someone’s fond thoughts, but there is no harm in asking about someone whose work is meaningful to you, just in case.
I will stop in periodically to answer questions, but I wasn’t expecting to be doing this today so I may not be camping here. I will definitely come back and make sure to collect all names from the comments at the end!
Stay cranky, my friends!
