Embedded images have wierd urls

[serapheus]

How come when you embed an image, just using the usual [ img] [ /img], it's url turns from something like:

This:
http://i.imgur.com/3A2pYeb.jpg

Into this?:
https://forum.questionablequesting.com /proxy.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2F3A2pYeb.jpg&hash=b7e8280b41da47b604c53c5bfe6201a2

It also changes the name of the image from "3A2pYeb.jpg" to "proxy.jpe".

This makes it pretty inconvenient to grab images from threads as you have to do it one by one, renaming each before you can grab another or they'll overwrite each other.

The url change also makes it difficult to do a reverse image search, if you're looking for a bigger version of an image or a higher quality one, as both Google and Tineye do not like the gobbledygook url it gets turned into.

 

[alethiophile]

This is intentional; it's Xenforo's image proxy system. Images embedded in posts are mirrored on the QQ server and the image links redirected to here. This is polite in terms of not using others' bandwidth (not so much a concern for big hosting sites like imgur, but still an issue for various other places), and it's also insurance against the images disappearing from their prior hosting and messing up the posts here.

If you want to download the images en masse, sufficient scripting can manage it; that's not our primary use case, so making it easy isn't a huge priority. If you want to reverse-search an image, try downloading that one alone and uploading it to the Google interface.