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Facebook Photos Broken Links

Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2013 2:23 pm
by Fred
Facebook recently changed their server layouts and didn't setup redirects. If you see "Image" in a post, it's a broken image link. If you hit quote and the image link is of the facebook type, don't worry, the photo is still on their servers, it just has a different domain section.

I and others had been using this for pics sometimes. I just updated some broken links from this to this:

http://a8.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/ < original, broken for my old pics
http://sphotos-d.ak.fbcdn.net/ < new, works for my old pics

There are variations on this theme, but they're available.

In any case, I'd recommend NOT using their hosting for photos if they're going to move things around without warning and break things.

Use imgur instead: http://imgur.com/

Fred.

Re: Facebook Photos Broken Links

Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2013 4:47 pm
by BenFenner
I've been dealing with Facebook doing this for 5 years on me. Sometimes they'll leave things alone for a year, other times they change stuff on a weekly basis depending on how they are feeling. I've resorted to posting the "download" image URL from Facebook which seems to stay static throughout most changes, but I am not guaranteeing that. Also I'm now posting a permanent link to the album, which I believe is not to change out from under you. That also helps you quickly retrieve a useful image URL in case things do change on you. (I have 13,805 images in 242 albums to hunt through which can make finding an image again pretty time consuming).

I would recommend www.imgur.com for a solution as well, but it is not a whole solution. Keep in mind that www.imgur.com will delete your image from their server if it has not been accessed in over 6 months. This is keeping me from using it for important images.

I'm unhappy with Flickr/Photobucket/ImageShack/TinyPic/etc. for other reasons so I can not recommend them. If anyone has a better idea, let me know. My standards are high.

Re: Facebook Photos Broken Links

Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2013 5:09 pm
by Nick_nl
You could use your own webspace. I have been doiing this for quite some time now. It costs a bit of money per year, but this way you have full controll over the pictures.

Re: Facebook Photos Broken Links

Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2013 6:36 pm
by malcom2073
I run my own website. If your internet is reliable enough, the bandwidth required is minimal

Re: Facebook Photos Broken Links

Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2013 8:14 pm
by Fred
I upload key stuff to my own domains for most purposes, but sometimes the image is already on fb and it makes sense to just use it. I won't be doing that in future, though. I'll cache it and use that instead.

Re: Facebook Photos Broken Links

Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2013 10:19 pm
by sry_not4sale
Fred, I wrote a script for my old SimpleMachines forum that downloaded any images linked to in a post and then added them as attachments to the post, modifying the [img] tags to point to the new, hosted image.

Would you like a copy of the code? Maybe you could alter it to suit phpBB?

Re: Facebook Photos Broken Links

Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2013 10:47 pm
by Fred
I've seen that being done, and if you saw the conversation about it, you'd probably not be suggesting it. It would be a bit different in the context of something like this, or yours, but in the context of a managed commercial forum/cash cow, it has a clear purpose ;-)

Feel free to send it, or attach it here, if you want, though. You never know, I could have a change of heart :-)

Fred.