this is exactly why I've taken the habit of saving every picture I like/fave, at any given moment people will delete what they had up and it ends up being a pain finding them again if someone else happened to save what it was.

same, i have about 12GB of art on file and still growing it by about .1 GB a day or so

I agree with this journal completely.

I agree...
I will NEVER delete things from my gallery.

Why can't we +fav journals?

You can always copy/paste em though. I'm not going to be offended.

why can't they just throw old stuff to scraps?

Because they don't value those who fav/comment the work or watch them.

FA needs to do something like DA and just have a storage button so all those favs and files things arn't lost atleast.

Yeah... friend of mine blew away his whole gallery and didn't tell me til after the fact. Turns out some of the pieces he blew away he doesn't have access to or just plain lost... those favorites really ARE destroyed. +1 on this. Better to leave the house than burn it down just because you're moving on. Someone else might still live there.

I love that analogy.

I agree. I wish they would at least leave the artist name and/or submission title so I have an idea of what is gone

grrr posting from my phone is so frustrating

No worries, I condensed them.

I never delete things. I might move them to scraps, but my gallery is a record of how I've learned and improved, and those beginning steps are just as important as where I am today.

I'll just kind of repeat what SorcererLance said XD

When I browse on FA, I instantly save anything I like at all (I save everything I favorite, plus a number of things I don't favorite, as well).

I actually do the same thing with Youtube. Anything I like enough to favorite there, I use a browser addon to save the video. Because stuff disappears from Youtube occasionally too, and I want to be able to go back and look at things I liked without having worry about them still being available on a web site.

these are my thoughts.

well spoken

Agreed, and thank you. You've been one of my favorite artists in the fandom for years and I do like going back and looking at the things you've done. It's a shame that there are bad memories back there for you, but the art, at least, is still beautiful.

I so agree with you on this.

Couldnt it be the FA staff removing files? I know they have been a little trigger happy about that lately and I think it says the same thing doesnt it?

It can be, but 99.9% of the time, it's the artist doing 'spring cleaning' like there is some kind of size limit on the number of submissions.

I hear you.

That's why I save those pieces to my drive... they disappear.

One great artist even returned with a completely new style. I asked if he was going to post his old piece again, so I could fav it. Nope, it's gone for good. Deleted from his drives and originals destroyed.

I'm so glad I save things.


Oh and artists, I realize emo eccentricity is part of your nature, but for your fans, do get over yourselves!

They never will.

i keep art of my mate still despite he is second most terible person i had unpleasure to meet in my life

I wish FA would adopt a policy where once you publish something, it's up forever (just like paper productions once they are released). Users could remove items from thir galleries if they were so inclined, but a person's favorites list would be unaffected.

That would be pretty cool.

There is a problem with possible copyright claims (meaning someone have favourited a "stolen" copy of an image); another is when others are allowed to see your favourites: do honour the wishes of the person picking them out or the artist who have hidden them away?

If someone uploaded material they don't own or have rights to, then they got a bigger set of problems to worry over (like prosecution). As for favorites, easily solved by allowing only the favorite list owner to see deleted favorites. Visitors looking at someone else's list would not see them.

Well, you are looking at this from the wrong viewpoint: these are easy choices for a user but quite hard for a system programmer.

Not really, my day job is a software engineer at a fortune 500 company. I can well appreciate the engineering challenges.

I do, too but... let's just say not *every* programmer does.

Like so many others I Save them. In fact I have only 2 favs to consider.

The Firefox FA addon is a wondrous thing.

There's an addon?! MOAR INFO PLEASE!!!

BOOM! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fi.....nity-extender/

Sweet. Thank you.

Awesome. Installed.

Wonder if it exists for Chrome...

*checks*

...not as such. But they have a couple of other overlays by :userSerotonin:.

Very much agreed there. Given most (not all) of my favs are involving art I've paid for, it's kinda annoying. I get kinda hung up on sorting out at least what it was through my repository. ;.;

I agree with that. People shouldn't delete stuff (unless requested by a commissioner or something). Though I do know of some instances where the person deleted it so they could re-upload the work. That I can understand, even if they don't actually have to (unless the submission just got so messed up to where a re-upload of the image won't fix it).

This doesn't apply to my recent gallery deletion because my old artwork gave my viewers eye cancer. I like to think i did the world a favor.

Hey, some of my best-selling prints are pieces I think are absolutely hideous. And people like seeing where your talent started. My early stuff is horrendous! It's still up.

I've checked your older stuff and it's still miles better compared to my old style. I used to draw my characters in a sucky weaboo style with horribly deformed chins. It was an abomination and needed to be purged.

I wonder how many faves each piece had before you deleted them... Next time you go to delete a pic, check and see how many times it's been faved. You might be surprised!

...and if you're not, and it's never been faved, go right ahead.

Doesn't matter now. It's gone and I have no intention of reuploading it. I feel much more satisfied with my newer works now and that's all that matters.

...to you. It's unfortunately that kind of thinking that causes the gray exes and upsets fans.

I understand how you feel, I personally hate a lot of the things I've posted online and find no artistic value in them, but I always get so much positive feedback when I post old things, and so many complaints when I mention the idea of removing them. Every artist hates their old works, but someone out there loves them. I've seen gorgeous pieces that the artist considered a piece of junk and not worth keeping. I've thrown away some pieces that I later regretted.

Someday down the line, you will hate the pieces you have up now. I feel sorry for the people who will have gray exes in their Favorites list because you, like almost every artist out there, didn't like your old stuff.

Fun fact: Picasso hated his early work too and said he wished he could destroy it. Imagine the loss if he had, somehow.

What's eye-cancer to you can be very special to someone else! Great artists like you and K'sharra... you're all far too hard on yourselves :)

I've definitely got into the habit of saving pictures again now as well, after a few of my own favourites vanished...

You're delusional and self-absorbed for believing that.

The same could be said of fans who feel they are owed art to be in one place online forever. There is such a thing as right-click > save.

Would have to agree, having those spots in your favorites list just feels so empty to me.

What -I- wouldnt mind is, if a pic HAS been deleted from an artists page, (and I faved it previously) I would love to remove it from my faves on my own page!

I have a LOT of 'stuck' faves in that fave page because of it, and whats worse, I cant remove that stupid "pic has been removed" image because its already BEEN removed *dies*

Actually you can manage your favorites from your Control Panel, it's just not easy to find. >.<

Hmm, I'll have to try that instead, thanks hun :3

BUT you would think that FA would have an "Easy Button" for that sort of thing :P

I forgot- yes you can do the Manage Favorites thing...

Why is it then, it goes back to the front page, instead of staying on the page that you were originally on :B

Yes, I know, pissing and moaning a bit much here :P

...Scratch that, found the solution, though its kinda clunky -

You have to 'fool' the browser a bit :3 By that- you have to put in the page number of where you want to to go in the favorites :B

Any site that wasn't programmed by trained chimps would have done it automatically. This is not such a site.

DeviantArt automatically removes favorites that have been deleted. Wish this site worked the same way.

And that's why I save my favorites.

100% agreed.  Mondegreen had a couple of comics about that:

https://www.furaffinity.net/view/7149554
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/7149902

Ha, adorable! Thanks for sharing!

Agreed... I really hate that because #1 you cant remove them, #2 it doesnt say what artist or piece and #3 you have no way of knowing if they simply uploaded a newer piece and deleted the old one, ect...

Sucks, I have dozens of those in my favorites.

You CAN remove them: Click Control Panel and then Manage Favorites. You can remove them one by one. It's just slow.

To 2 and 3, yes, you're 100% right, and it sucks. Somewhere out there, there is an artist that is losing fans because their Internet trail is being erased behind them. I can't even go back and check their journals to see if they changed accounts or anything, because I don't know who did it.

EXACTLY

i hate how i gotta go through my favorites to delete each one individually, one at a time.

Yes, they should totally have a "Nuke deleted submissions" button.

or the ability to pick which ones then hit a "deleted selected" button

Any site that wasn't programmed by chimps would have made it automatic. There's literally one line of code they'd have to change.

I hate seeing 'submission has been deleted', it's depressing, especially when I'm unsure just what the submission was.

It's for the same reason then I hate it when old websites go down with their content being forever lost. If one has stopped updating it that I'm fine if they say they're leaving it up but won't be updating it anymore and might not answer e-mails but for the site to simply vanish without explanation is depressing.

Its aggravating as all hell.

Indeed, incredibly frustrating.

The only two things I deleted from my gallery were taken down because I hadn't yet realised you could replace the existing pics (replaced inferior scans of sketches with clearer ones).

I agree with this journal 130% even if I am one of the people who did that a while back. but since then I've found that its just better to keep the stuff up.

No worries. I've done it before too. I think every artist has tried to cover up their tracks at least once...

On the internet, if you like it, save it. Everything goes away eventually. :) There is no permanency in the virtual universe, everything is malleable. One day, FA will probably be gone, or a ghost town, for one reason or another. Just speaking from experience. =^.^=

I think of 'favourites' as merely a way to say I like something, myself, without necessarily leaving a comment. If I really like it, I save it. So many lost and forgotten oddities do I have on my hard drive that no one remembers and that definitely aren't available online anymore. XD

I completely agree. I also save everything I like because I know people often delete work rather than shift it to scraps. Artists can be a little self-centered in regards to their artwork, and so they'll delete it without a thought of how it affects others. :/

There's also occasionally people who move accounts and delete the stuff off their old one when they move to the new one.

The thing that bugs me, though, is that the site never tells me *what* got deleted, so that I might be able to find it elsewhere.

If I stop wanting something on prominent display, I scrap it. Simple as that. Mind you, it's not like I'm overflowing with 'fans' - I can scarcely afford to be scaring my miniscule audience away.

That makes me sad too :/ For a lot of the same reasons. If I fav something, there is something aesthetically appealing to me about it in some way.

I unwatch anyone who I find out deletes stuff. Anyone who doesn't give a damn about their watchers doesn't deserve my support.

Thats a bit much. Some folks remove pictures because they might have some hard memories to them. Like loving pictures drawn of an ex that slighted them, pictures they feel they shouldn't have posted because it makes them look like a weirdo. (I am going through that now but since so many people like it I keep the few pics I have like that up.)

People want to show off their absolute best. Just save the stuff you like and move on. If the artist wants to delete the picture for some reason let it be.

If they value deleting stuff more than the watchers who watch, fav, comment and commission, then that's their choice, their right.
It's my right to object to their behavior and not support them in any way.

I know the feeling, sometimes it's art I never got a chance to save and I go back to find it deleted o_o;

I promise not to delete anything

yea i know i've seen your work & loved it even before i knew you had an FA account. i love your work for some one to just throw away a pice of art is just so wrong. the resin i fallow the artist that i do is becose there is some thing special about there art.

People change, for better or worse, whether others like it or not, whether the person likes it or not. My gallery is my place of self-expression. Honestly, I don't really know how I'm supposed to feel when on one side I'm told to showcase my best and on the other am told it's rude to edit what I release. I just follow my own truth. In the end isn't that all that matters to people on both sides?

If you don't want to showcase it anymore, stick it in scraps. That's what the section is there for.

It's not so much rude, it's just... sad. I totally understand wanting to present your best works in a gallery. But to be honest, I don't see FA as the kind of site where you showcase your best stuff in a portfolio to impress potential customers. Or if you do host that kind of gallery here, move stuff into Scraps as it becomes obsolete. As long as it's still preserved somehow. You don't have to delete it.

Mostly what I have been carefully culling from my gallery is certain adult works, and that is sort of a different thing from the stuff going obsolete. It's more complicated than moving things to scraps. As long as it exists online it is a part of my Internet Identity. Privacy and control over that is a hot topic and there is no easy answer to the best way on how to handle that. I handle it the best way I know how and feel that my choices are my own business. And they might be the best ones for me in my circumstances. Everybody better believe I don't use FA as a portfolio.

I'm not concerned with sadness because it's not just in the virtual world that things go away, disappear, are destroyed and are mourned and that for some reason some people think it should not be that way and that it's preventable. It's a little distressing for some people (reading the comments) to suggest that it is wrong and selfish and the people who do it are bad, if I apply it to myself since I have been taking similar actions to what is being discussed.

I just want to give my two cents and share my side and my philosophy. How important is it, absolutely and truly, to keep things FOREVER AND EVER? Do we REALLY have the ability? Is FA really any different from the rest of the Internet? There doesn't seem to be a universal 'etiquette' to deletion.

How many people read my journal? I read maybe 7% of journal entries. If I ever sent out a headsup that I was about to delete things, who would have seen it? I guess it would be seen by to whom it mattered.

I save the ones i really like.

Hi there Ksharra.

I noticed more an more just artists in general would either clear out all their art that is older than a few years. One artist I watch MoodyFerret. Is famous for as soon as he/she posts the next day or so he/she deletes. Its really sad and pathetic.

Other artists especially recently have vanished with out a trace. I don't know their reasons for disapearing but its even sadder when the artist cleans out their entire gallery not only on FA but every other site they were once known. Just because you want to "leave" the fandom as some may say doesn't mean you should erase your entire exsistance and shun all thouse who once admired your art work. It isn't fair to all your fans. Even if you just walk away from it all.

I am a musician. And I started years ago and still write music. Alot of the music that I have put on fa when I just started is still here in my galleries. Why? Well I do find it a bit crappy compared to what I now can do with my talents. But it shows a time line. A time line where I just started to today and you can hear for yourself the stuggle and how I toned in my tallents. Just like anyone else out here it serves as inspiration. Not everyone is born painting the sistine chaple.

Even my older works I am still surprised when someone would fave it.. It Gives me a smile knowing I did something that made someone else happy. And even though I dont feel stongly of my old works. It for me is worth it. I learn from everything I do. And so with that, and the very few fans I have. It inspires me more..

I guess Alot of artists just simply don't know how much they actrully hurt the fandom and upcoming artist when they dont' archive their artwork. It is a really sad thing. And not just here on fa. but everywhere..

I'm gonna go with the minority and say that an artist has just as much right to choose what they keep in their gallery and what they delete. It's their gallery in the end. Some artists simply prefer to keep a cleaner, smaller gallery than others, rather than have it as an eternal archive of everything they ever posted. I don't consider it selfish, especially since they've already shared it with the world for free. As was said above, the user can always right-click > save something if they enjoy it a lot. I know I do when I come across pieces that really wow me.

No, I'm not saying artists don't have the right. I just think it's sad when they do. Like trying to erase history. I try to look back on my life in a way that says "Yes I did that, and it may have sucked, but I wouldn't be myself if I hadn't been there and done that." I've learned to look back at my art in the same way.

If I was a professional artist who courted commissions and customers, I would totally have a showcase gallery that only contained my best works. But I'm not. I'm a hobbyist who mostly draws for myself, shares it for the fans, and occasionally takes money when demand gets too great. (I seriously hate taking commissions. But I do it anyways sometimes.) And I think it's great for even the professionals to keep a kind of "history" gallery, to show where they've been and how far they've come.

Plus, I've been burned on saving images. I used to have a large collection of saved images from the web, carefully organized into folders, downloaded for posterity... I have no idea where those files went. Probably lost to a crashed hard drive, or lost in the mists of time, or so on. This has happened more than once.

I can understand that hesitance to save it in that case. I guess I just was noticing there were some people who were going beyond "it's sad" to "the artist owes us this piece to be there just because we're fans." And that is irksome. But then I come from a graffiti perspective: I've become used to art being a temporary thing and I don't feel the artist or the world owes me anything about it. Instead of faving a painting on the street or highway or on a traincar, all we have to hold on to is getting a photo. I've seen any number of great pieces go up and then get covered, buffed or fade away and that's just the nature of things. Hell, some of my work has been lost forever, never documented. It's equally as sad, but I kinda just take it as a fact of life. In the same way, if I see a piece on here I like, I save it in hopes of holding on to it a little longer in case they do remove it. Which has happened. Is there a chance I'll still lose it? Sure. But that's my prerogative on how desperately I want to keep it safe. There's always backups.

Sorry if I'm getting a little pedantic and philosophical, but I've come to accept nothing lasts forever. I feel for your situation (I'm pretty much exactly the same as you with commissions and this being a hobby until money goes dry). If I ever delete a piece of mine you want, I'll gladly send you a high quality version to keep :3

My thoughts exactly. I also only fav the really good pieces. It always makes me sad when a great artist deletes everything when they leave. How many will I never know existed because there is nothing left? Many artists have many reasons for deleting but it really sux to find that some of your favorite pieces are gone forever. That is why I save it when I fav it.

I wish I could favourite this journal, it is nothing but truth. So many people do rage quits or mass deletions of their galleries.. some even not stating where they have left to, perhaps with good reason but that means that their beauty and talent is forever hidden.

i will agree that it can be annoying or saddening when an artist removes something that to you or others was special - especially if you do not have it saved. but i really do think that the artist should have the freedom to decide what to do with their own work. i don't think it is fair that they should feel guilty or be thought of as rude / not appreciating their fans :( i would hate for someone to take it personally if i removed something, as it would be for personal, not malicious reasons. thankfully i don't think it's something i have to worry about much, as i am not a popular artist, have limited skill, and don't upload much (i watch and favourite things much more often). but with people seeming to hold entitlement over the work of others, it isn't particularly encouraging to contribute more either :( (although i'd like to point out that comment is meant to be general rather than a direct response to your journal entry, and includes other issues besides submission deletion).

I agree completely, a loss like that is the saddest thing on any site. I try to save as much as I can, but there's only so much room and it seems every few years I have a hard drive crash that wipes out 90% of my files. With my own work, that usually means it's gone irrevocably (except for the stuff I have scribbled in notebooks or on the back of a cardboard snack tray from Amtrak), but with art that's posted online there's always the hope that I can get it back--so long as it's still there and I can remember where I found it.

Hell, I once had to recover my wedding pictures from an image-host after my own copies fried.

Totally agree. I save more them fav for those reasons. I have delete things from my gallery a couple times, but never anything anyone had faved. Cuz i hate those grey Xs too.

Pretty much! I agree.

I kinda wish FA would decide to remove those grey boxes, they seem pointless. At least seems like they removed them from your inboxes.

Reminds me. I have a few I should probably download onto SHere Khan when I get a few minutes. Maybe this weekend....

I have favorited only one thing in all the time I've been here. It's still there.

The internet is not permanent and never has been. If you want to keep a post, then use the download feature and put it on your own hard drive.

Oh, the artists I'll never find again....

I know the feeling

this is also why every time an artist here posts a journal "I am going to 'clean' my gallery" I advice that artist NOT to


if you ignore what you have made in the past you wont learn anything in the future.

I know a good number of FA artists that keep pulling crap - and for the same reason don't really evolve or improve very much

hell, most of them either stagnate, eventually stop drawing or even get worse!

I completely agree with you K'sharra =/ What disappoints me is this strange account switching some artist do, just for the sake of having another user name on here and then delete their old gallery. It's their freedom to change to a new account, but I see absolutely no rational sense in deleting all their old work. I experienced that several times and in most cases I didn't have a copy of those pictures, since I rely on FA as platform for furry art and don't want to fill one harddrive after another with furry art just for the case that artists start deleting their work.

I completely agree. -.-

I like your view on things, there have been too many times I've gone through my old old favorites to be confronted by page after page of submission has been deleted. I just want to say thank you for leaving all your pieces up regardless of your feelings on them.

times out of 10 I find out that it was someone of the Thousand or so people watch streaming, and they put up a 'Now Live Streaming!' picture, then take it down when they are done.

but I could be wrong

I'm MMM, and I approve of this message.

*raises a glass to you* Hear hear. Beautiful words that should resonate throughout FA for users to consider before they begin to destroy the respect that's been built up for them by the users.

What really would be nice is if FA would provide a set of web service endpoints. Then we could build an unlimited plethora of clients that leverage it. Imagine an android or iOS app that directly interfaced via those services, and presented using native ui interfaces. That would be glorious.

You'll have to forgive if any of those were mine... granted I'm a fair nobody in the fandom with, at best, moderate skill to show, but stalker issues, as you know, have left me with no choice but to eviscerate my archives. :(

That said, yay for the art that survives.

Well, if the artist decides to take it down, well it's their stuff after all. Sad but their choice. Maybe some are not satisfied with the version and want to update?
The only thing you can do if you like art is save it. I do so and always make sure to include artist's name in the filename.