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On the Disappearance of Art on FA (and DA)
9 months ago
For some time, long ago I have saved every single artwork that I have added to my favorites here on FA. Since I do some restructuring of my reference folder I rediscovered this little time capsule and saw that I started it almost exactly ten years ago. I decided to check how many of the favorites have vanished…
For this little study I compared the favorites that I saved on my local computer with the ones that are still in the galleries online here on FA. I saved them in batches of 100 and in the same order and it looks as follows:
Batch 000-099, saved on Dec 14, 2014: 15% has vanished
Batch 100-199, saved between Dec 14, 2014 and April 22, 2016: 15% has vanished
Batch 200-299, saved between April 22, 2016 and January 21, 2017: 14% has vanished
Batch 300-394, saved between January 21, 2017 and December 28, 2017: 7.5% has vanished
Note that this doesn’t say anything about when the artwork has been uploaded or when I added it to my favorites. I only have the data of when I saved the art onto my computer compared to today. As you see in my dataset for seven to ten year old favorites, about 15% of the artwork has vanished. Now what can we learn from this?
1. The longer ago you faved something the higher is the chance, that the original uploader deleted it from their gallery.
2. Your favorites are not save, if you hold dear all the art you fav then the only way to make sure to keep it is to save it locally.
3. Even if you visit one of the FA mirrors out there (yes, they exist) or other art platforms, they may still contain all the art, however there is no way to know which of the artworks you faved unless you make like a snapshot of your favorites once in a while. Long ago, FA would notify you of deleted favorites, however this feature was useless since you didn’t know anymore what artwork has been actually deleted. It was not only useless but it created work for you since you had to delete the deleted artworks from your favorites as I recall.
I did the same study on DA (Deviantart) where it looks as follows:
Batch 000-099, saved between April 22, 2016 and April 23, 2016: 15% has vanished
Batch 100-199, saved on April 23, 2016: 26% has vanished
Batch 200-299, saved between April 23, 2016 and April 24, 2016: 22% has vanished
Batch 300-399, saved on April 24, 2016: 42% has vanished
Batch 400-499, saved on April 24, 2016: 31% has vanished
Batch 500-599, saved on April 24, 2016: 31% has vanished
Batch 600-695, saved between April 24, 2016 and December 28, 2017: 40% has vanished
As you see the situation looks even more grim on Deviantart. However, the sets are not directly comparable since the favorites on DA were much older, of different quality and there has been a recent exodus of artists since they allow AI art. Also dA is basically dead, eaten up by all the bigger social networks that reign over the internet today. Still sad to see how much great art was deleted that I still like today.
This is not a criticism on FA/DA or the artists who delete their art. Everyone has the right to delete what they uploaded to their gallery of course. It is just a study on the hard facts of how much art is lost over time on these platforms.
Conclusion: Save the art that you hold dear, because there is a high chance it will be deleted within the next ten years and you WILL forget about it. :(
Hope you like this little insight! :)
For this little study I compared the favorites that I saved on my local computer with the ones that are still in the galleries online here on FA. I saved them in batches of 100 and in the same order and it looks as follows:
Batch 000-099, saved on Dec 14, 2014: 15% has vanished
Batch 100-199, saved between Dec 14, 2014 and April 22, 2016: 15% has vanished
Batch 200-299, saved between April 22, 2016 and January 21, 2017: 14% has vanished
Batch 300-394, saved between January 21, 2017 and December 28, 2017: 7.5% has vanished
Note that this doesn’t say anything about when the artwork has been uploaded or when I added it to my favorites. I only have the data of when I saved the art onto my computer compared to today. As you see in my dataset for seven to ten year old favorites, about 15% of the artwork has vanished. Now what can we learn from this?
1. The longer ago you faved something the higher is the chance, that the original uploader deleted it from their gallery.
2. Your favorites are not save, if you hold dear all the art you fav then the only way to make sure to keep it is to save it locally.
3. Even if you visit one of the FA mirrors out there (yes, they exist) or other art platforms, they may still contain all the art, however there is no way to know which of the artworks you faved unless you make like a snapshot of your favorites once in a while. Long ago, FA would notify you of deleted favorites, however this feature was useless since you didn’t know anymore what artwork has been actually deleted. It was not only useless but it created work for you since you had to delete the deleted artworks from your favorites as I recall.
I did the same study on DA (Deviantart) where it looks as follows:
Batch 000-099, saved between April 22, 2016 and April 23, 2016: 15% has vanished
Batch 100-199, saved on April 23, 2016: 26% has vanished
Batch 200-299, saved between April 23, 2016 and April 24, 2016: 22% has vanished
Batch 300-399, saved on April 24, 2016: 42% has vanished
Batch 400-499, saved on April 24, 2016: 31% has vanished
Batch 500-599, saved on April 24, 2016: 31% has vanished
Batch 600-695, saved between April 24, 2016 and December 28, 2017: 40% has vanished
As you see the situation looks even more grim on Deviantart. However, the sets are not directly comparable since the favorites on DA were much older, of different quality and there has been a recent exodus of artists since they allow AI art. Also dA is basically dead, eaten up by all the bigger social networks that reign over the internet today. Still sad to see how much great art was deleted that I still like today.
This is not a criticism on FA/DA or the artists who delete their art. Everyone has the right to delete what they uploaded to their gallery of course. It is just a study on the hard facts of how much art is lost over time on these platforms.
Conclusion: Save the art that you hold dear, because there is a high chance it will be deleted within the next ten years and you WILL forget about it. :(
Hope you like this little insight! :)
E621 is a nice archival site for the fandom, with the best quality possible, and I personally think more artists should upload art (video support and REALLY high filesize and resolution limits are an extra niceties too)
I made a tagging group with things that are in all pictures of my sona, and I edit it as necessary
Its just that on a much smaller scale.
Less new art, old art disappears... not a good situation imo.
I ended up at the following three part system:
1. A folder with around 20 selected artists (and their artworks) I gravitate to for reference and inspiration.
2. A folder where I ordered artwork in around 30 sub categories (Feet, Vore, Macro, POV, Muscle and so on), mostly NSFW. However there is a lot of overlap between themes since it is basically impossible to categorize all of it perfectly. But it is also not necessary...
3. A folder for general inspiration where I just throw in all the leftover art that did not fit into 1. or 2. That one is just ordered by the year I saved the artwork. That one is mostly SFW.
Hope I could help you. :)
today i´m not saving that much anymore one day i will get over my saved stuff and sort stuff out for sure ^^
and yeah i know about some of thous backup sides, strange to look yourself up and see the stuff you yourself had posted and deleted over the years xD
Just recently thought "Did they remove the deleted favourites feature" as I didn't see one for a long while now lol. Honestly yeah, it was useless.
Maybe I'll start archiving some stuff, I do have a 3TB drive that is just collecting dust..
I am glad that I had been saving art for the better part of two decades that's for sure ^.=.^;
It's still sad sometimes. There are artworks from my start of getting into furry stuff that I've been searching for years and haven't found yet again.
E621 is a good option, but a lot of that is removed for paywall reasons or even just artist takedown requests. Quite the shame to see so much great art essentially disappearing from the internet :(
For this reason i have a script that downloads things like that (on multiple types of websites) as doing this manually is too much work for me.