I just inserted an image-link into someone's answer (uploading the picture from my computer), and I notice that the image now resides at https://i.sstatic.net/. Is that an SE site, assuring that linked images there will be preserved as part of the answers in which they appear? (The expected obvious answer is "yes", but I haven't seen it documented anywhere.)
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Here is the meta.SO post about stack.imgur.com.
Unfortunately it is not the case that this site preserves images indefinitely (see the comments on Jeff Atwood's answer); however, they will remain significantly longer than most images hosted on the imgur site.
Hooray! I was mistaken earlier; it is the case that images uploaded via stack.imgur.com will be hosted indefinitely, or at least as long as the SE team continues to renew the contract for the imgur pro account, which we can certainly expect to be as long as the world keeps turning.
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/new-image-upload-support/
answered Nov 30, 2011 at 17:09
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$\begingroup$ Just wondering - on some filesharing sites you can prevent links from dying by downloading the files regularly (say once in two months). This can, of course, be automatized. Would something like that work for imgur? Would it be unwelcome for too much load on servers? $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 30, 2011 at 17:15
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$\begingroup$ Very interesting, and important, I think. From now on, if an answer includes an image-link, I'll make an effort to (re-)write the answer in such a way that when/if the link expires, the answer remains intelligible without the image. $\endgroup$– r.e.s.Commented Nov 30, 2011 at 17:15
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$\begingroup$ @Martin: That is an interesting idea, and I'm afraid I don't know the answer. My sense was that this does work for imgur, at least for some number of times, but that there was still some absolute time frame for removing images. However, I don't see any place I can justify that impression. I also don't know if, or to what extent, doing this would be unwelcome. $\endgroup$– Zev Chonoles ModCommented Nov 30, 2011 at 17:18
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$\begingroup$ Well, at least it should be possible to automatize checking whether the links are alive. Of course, this requires effort on my side: I have to run the script from time to time and I have to keep somewhere the information which image belong to which post, so that I can replace it if it expires. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 30, 2011 at 17:23
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4$\begingroup$ I'm under the expectation that we'd renew the contract once it ends, not that we'd just let it expire. Letting every image across the entire network fail after a year when we setup the system explicitly to avoid image decay would be very... ill-thought-out. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 30, 2011 at 18:42
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$\begingroup$ @GraceNote: Of course :) But am I correct in my understanding that the contract is not actually for permanent hosting? $\endgroup$– Zev Chonoles ModCommented Nov 30, 2011 at 18:51
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4$\begingroup$ @Zev I would say the intent is for "effectively permanent" hosting. It's just not internal so it isn't literally permanent, but in practice, images uploaded through us to i.stack.imgur are intended to be indefinitely available enough. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 30, 2011 at 18:52
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$\begingroup$ Thank you for the clarification, I had thought I'd seen images on posts created after this change still go missing, but I must have been mistaken. I will correct my answer. $\endgroup$– Zev Chonoles ModCommented Nov 30, 2011 at 18:56
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5$\begingroup$ @Zev Things have gone missing, but that wasn't because of decay. Rather, it was the result of our global replace of
i.imgurwithi.stack.imgurpicking up things that were uploaded just to plain imgur (which would make the i.stack.imgur link null). It's something that's still in the process of getting cleaned up, haha. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 30, 2011 at 20:33
![and]) with something useful! "enter image description here" is of no help in reconstituting pictures if need be. $\endgroup$