The post and comment Frith linked to indicate that Dreamwidth set up a proxy for images whose URLs use HTTP instead of HTTPS, as otherwise browsers would give users a mixed content warning when loading the HTTPS Dreamwidth page which included the HTTP images. This proxy has been there for over 2 years; I'm surprised I didn't notice it before now.
But how that proxy is implemented, and if DW caches the images, or how often it checks if the image has changed at the original URL, I'm not clear.
I noticed this all to begin with because I missed uploading one of the images that I linked to. My post preview showed a broken image icon. That is when I checked the image URL and found it had a DW URL instead of my original image URL. Then I uploaded the image, but my post still showed the broken image icon... so I think there must be some caching being done. I forget how I fixed it; I either had to re-open the page, or re-save my post (which when I edit it now, still displays the original URLs BTW).
2) I hadn't thought about that. Interesting thought. I was initially concerned whether DW would still keep copies of images on its servers after I deleted them from the original location. That is something I'd like to have control over. Having DW keep its own copies could be a good thing, to keep images from breaking when my image hosting goes down. Or a bad thing, if I wanted to remove the images on purpose. But at least now I know that if I host my images via HTTPS instead of HTTP, then the proxy shouldn't end up being used anyway. I put it on my To-Do list to research how to do the latter, but it's not a priority for me. Maybe someday.
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Date: 2019-09-04 01:36 pm (UTC)From:But how that proxy is implemented, and if DW caches the images, or how often it checks if the image has changed at the original URL, I'm not clear.
I noticed this all to begin with because I missed uploading one of the images that I linked to. My post preview showed a broken image icon. That is when I checked the image URL and found it had a DW URL instead of my original image URL. Then I uploaded the image, but my post still showed the broken image icon... so I think there must be some caching being done. I forget how I fixed it; I either had to re-open the page, or re-save my post (which when I edit it now, still displays the original URLs BTW).
2) I hadn't thought about that. Interesting thought. I was initially concerned whether DW would still keep copies of images on its servers after I deleted them from the original location. That is something I'd like to have control over. Having DW keep its own copies could be a good thing, to keep images from breaking when my image hosting goes down. Or a bad thing, if I wanted to remove the images on purpose. But at least now I know that if I host my images via HTTPS instead of HTTP, then the proxy shouldn't end up being used anyway. I put it on my To-Do list to research how to do the latter, but it's not a priority for me. Maybe someday.