For more than a decade, Imgur has provided image hosting services to Stack Exchange, but that hosting contract with Imgur comes to an end this upcoming April 2024. This April will conclude a decade-long successful relationship between Imgur and Stack, for which the whole company has been deeply grateful. However, Imgur no longer provides an enterprise image hosting product, and therefore, it has come time to find an alternative solution.

This post serves as your advance notice that this change is coming down the pipeline. This post is coming to you very early - so you have time to prepare. Here’s a rough sketch for how the next few months are going to look.

We are working on a plan to develop a solution to the image hosting problem. The exact implementation details are still being finalized, and we are in the research and discovery phase for a new image hosting solution. An internal proof-of-concept will inform the image hosting provider we ultimately settle on, and we expect this preliminary work to conclude some time in December of this year. Once our image hosting concept is proven out, we will transition to developing the solution we’d like to hold for the long term. We are aiming to complete core work on this new solution before the end of March 2024. However, as we are in the proof of concept stage, this schedule may shift considerably.

Some time in late December or early January, after proof-of-concept work completes, I will update this post to contain more details on how our solution will work, the sort of impact it will have on the network (if any - ideally very little), and the timeline on which that work will be completed.

For now, if you’ve got concerns about this change, feel free to leave them in answers below and we’ll answer them as best we can. Bear in mind that our plans are not settled yet, so our ability to answer technical or implementation questions may be limited.