About

Imgur (pronounced imager^[10], stylized imgur) is an online image hosting service primarily known for its free subscription-free hosting and heavy use by the news aggregation website Reddit.

History

On February 23, 2009, Alan Schaaf^[1] created the image hosting service Imgur. On the same day, Alan (Reddit handle MrGrim^[2]) posted a thread on the /r/reddit.com subreddit on Reddit called "My Gift to Reddit: I created an image hosting service that doesn't suck. What do you think?" containing a link to Imgur^[3]. The post received over 2100 upvotes and over 670 comments since first posted. Within the first year of launch, Imgur has "sprouted into a hotbed of online culture", serving almost 20 million pageviews a month^[4].

Features

The most attractive feature of Imgur is its simple uploading feature, as opposed to competing image hosting services like Photobucket and Imageshack. Imgur also has an Application Programming Interface (API) where third-party developers can manipulate the full functionality of the site, to create their own services like web applications and mobile applications^[7]. The site also has a PRO feature, which raises the image hosting limit to unlimited (as opposed to 255 images for standard accounts)^[8]. Imgur also has some uploading tools for web browsers (Firefox and Chrome) and Content Management Services such as Wordpress^[9] as well as a Custom Gallery page that enables users to keep track of their favorite tags in one place.^[12]

Image Captioning Tool

On June 26th, 2013, Imgur launched its own image macro generator service^[11] to fill the void on Reddit after Quickmeme was banned from the site for using bots to downvote submissions generated via competitors. According to the company, the captioning tool has been under development for several months, but the project was quick-tracked to meet the demand of its users.

In the days leading up to its launch, Redditors on /r/adviceanimals began uploading their Quickmeme creations to Imgur as a temporary workaround, with many suggesting that Imgur should introduce an image captioning tool of its own.

Highlights

2013 April Fools Day

On April 1st, 2013, Imgur announced that it will start accepting image submissions via postal service with an "upload via snail mail" feature, encouraging users to print their images and mail it to the provided address of Imgur's San Francisco office to be featured on the site within two to three weeks. The post was also accompanied by a tongue-in-cheek prologue explaining their reason.

At Imgur, our users’ input is the driving force behind all of our decisions. With the rise of the hipster, we were forced to ask ourselves, “How can we attract the film camera user?” It became evident to us that a more non-traditional type of uploading is necessary to appeal to a broad user base which includes film users, the computer illiterate, and those afraid of radiation from scanners. Snail mail is a proven method of data transfer that has been around long before the Internet. To stay on the forefront of technology, we’re going back to the roots of communication.

International Upvote Everything Day

On July 12th, 2016, Imgur user ErinFromTheOffice^[13] uploaded an image of Heath Ledger's Joker with text declaring "On July 29, 2016, upvote everything in usersub. Everything. The FP (front page) people will finally know what it's really like down here." As of July 29th, 2016, the post has received over 15,000 upvotes.

On July 29th, 2016, Imgur's front page was filled with posts celebrating Upvote Everything Day.^[14][15][16] Users took the opportunity to try and get shitposts on the front page, either with disturbing content^[18] or with irrelevant memes.^[17]

Sea Slugs

On November 9th, following the 2016 United States Presidential Election, Imgur users banded together to fill the front page with sea slugs as a distraction from politics. The phenomenon started following dozens of photo posts of sea slugs from user Homophone^[19] captioned, "I voted, now I'm posting sea slugs until I feel better" (shown below).

In the following day, over one thousand posts related to sea slugs were posted and upvoted in an effort to get politics off the front page of Imgur.^[20] As of November 10th, 2016, the top sea slug post comes from irtaylor^[21] captioned, "Fill the Front Page with Sea Slugs" (below, left). The same day, user IceSentry took to /r/OutOfTheLoop^[22] to ask a question about the rise of sea slugs on Imgur.

Traffic

According to Imgur's monthly site statistics^[5], for the monthly period between 11th of October to 10th of November, 61,627,977 images were uploaded and image views were 29,976,799,540. Bandwidth used has reached 3.67 petabytes. The site has an Alexa rank of 98 in November 2012^[6].

Search Interest

External References