In a devastating blog post, image-uploading site Abload announced that it would be permanently shutting down its website by June 30, 2024. Abload, which has been around as a free service since 2006, stopped accepting new uploads back in December 2023.
According to the blog post, the team had spent four months trying to keep the site afloat but failed in the end and now its entire contents — legacy images and links alike — are forfeit. What makes this even more tragic is that it’s something that keeps happening as the internet becomes more profit-driven and centralized.
This phenomenon recently occurred with Gliphy, a free site where you could upload and create gifs that could then be shared throughout the internet. Gliphy eventually went under and with it the entire expanse of its years-long collection. Just like that, internet history was erased. Even some of my own works have suffered thanks to losing this valuable resource.
Remnants of the old internet are disappearing
There’s a pattern here, with websites from the older internet created so users can freely create and share content being driven either to adopt a subscription model to survive or perish and sacrifice its entire catalog of content. Even looking at our best photo storage and sharing sites list, the only entries that survived from that era are Flickr and Photobucket, with the latter completely eliminating its free-use option.
Seeing so much online history being lost, with very few methods left to preserve it (the Wayback Machine, an amazing resource, cannot preserve Abload’s images), is truly difficult to watch. Personal cloud storage has grown in popularity over the years but as you can see from our aforementioned list, almost none of them serve the same function as these older websites. They solely exist to store photos but are incapable of letting you share and embed them on other websites.
It represents how much the internet has changed over the decades. Unfortunately, the reality is that as the internet changes instead of its past being preserved it’s instead discarded and lost to time. This also has the added effect of breaking old websites and forums that featured a significant amount of images from hosting sites like Abload, which means even more of what remains of archived content is further lost and ruined.