Updates to the images you see on beer/place profiles don't occur too often, but they're requested millions of times a month. I apply a long cache time on them to save significant resources, but if the image is removed or updated on our servers the old image is still cached by Cloudflare and displayed until cleared. Confusing when trying to upload a new image and you keep seeing the old one. As a workaround, I'm now versioning images to bust through the cache. This means you should always see the most recent image. Anyway. Uploading images is already a pain in the ass, but hopefully this makes it a bit less frustrating. And everything appears to be working, but let me know if you hit any issues. Thanks!
Todd, at one point — maybe a year ago? — you teased direct image hosting coming to the site soon. Is that still in the works?
For the forum, and just for Society members, but that's a completely different thing and won't be supported until sometime next year at this point.
Everything seems to be working and all the old ghost photos have been replaced with the new ones. Thanks!
Went back to find a specific beer of mine and noticed my image was gone. I noticed the same issue on several others and have now started re-uploading pictures. It’s happening to random beer photos, not just my own. @Todd Is there any way to stop this issue so that we don’t lose any more perfectly good beer photos? Some of my pics that I re-uploaded this morning have since been approved, but based on a quick count out of the last 50 beers I’ve reviewed 7 have unexplainably lost their pics.
Images only get removed if there's a request to replace them with an updated image, but feel free to provide links to the beers in question and I'll take a look.
https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/52867/508662/?ba=LeinenkugelDrinker# https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/132/96214/?ba=LeinenkugelDrinker#lists https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/124/1256/?ba=LeinenkugelDrinker#lists Those are just a few, on the next three I’ve already re-uploaded their pics; https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/385/344716/?ba=LeinenkugelDrinker#lists https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/21517/562899/?ba=LeinenkugelDrinker#lists https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/21517/745812/?ba=LeinenkugelDrinker#lists
Sometimes photos get wiped when beers get merged. I believe the way the system works is that the older beer's photo (or lack thereof) trumps the newer beer's photo when they're merged. Not saying that's what happened here but it's possible. Todd will investigate
@LeinenkugelDrinker: What @cryptichead said. There's nothing unusual going on here. The first three have no beer images due to merging, which happens frequently due to duplicate entries being submitted. And when people upload images to those vs. the existing beer, any image associated with the dupe is lost. And if there's an older image on the existing beer, there's a change we'll get a report to remove it so it can be replaced with a new one. Archaic, but that's the way it's been working for ages. My goal is to finally upgrade all of this, but there are several other dependencies that need to be completed first.
No. They're not associated with any merges. So either there were simply no images to begin with or reports were sent to remove older images, but nothing unusual is going on here either and none of this is related to the update.
Interesting. They must’ve been removed since I was the one who originally uploaded the photos for those beers. Anyways, thanks for the explanation. For the beers that now lack pictures I guess I’ll upload some more of mine as there’s no way to get the original ones back, correct?
Basically. Dupes with images get soft-deleted. While the image is still there (for now), it's not easily accessible. And when an image gets deleted, it's removed from our servers.
