Workaround for broken pictures

[Marcus Russi]

The workaround

I'm flying to Seatac tomorrow for a few weeks of Cascades fun, so this issue has been bugging me while I've been trying to research various routes. I developed a workaround that will at least allow you to download the photos for any TR that has broken images. If you have have a Unix-based environment with GNU Parallel installed and know how to use Bash or another terminal, I wrote a short script that takes as input a cascadeclimbers.com TR URL and transforms the broken links into ones that work. Then, it saves the images into your working directory. I've tried it with this TR and a few other ones with broken images and it appears to work as advertised.

get_tr_pics.sh

Example usage:

The issue

The issue appears to involve the "image proxy" of Invision, the software that runs the forum. As I understand it, the "image proxy" takes the URL of an image and fetches it through the server (rather than having your computer connect directly to the website), then forwards the image on to the user. It appears that a large subset of URLs for images that are hosted on cascadeclimbers.com, but nevertheless get routed through the proxy, either don't work anymore (are "dead links"), aren't compatible with the URL format the proxy expects, (http vs. https, www vs. no www, etc.), or both. I think all of the images are still living on the server, but they're not accessible through the forum's image proxy, which means you have to get the original, un-proxied URL yourself, and request that directly from the site.

To see this in action yourself, instead of using my script, take a broken URL like the following:

Quote

https://cascadeclimbers.com/forum/applications/core/interface/imageproxy/imageproxy.php?img=http://www.cascadeclimbers.com/plab/data/500/2017BakertoRoss30558.JPG&key=6cce38faa871c887d4297fc823deebfcdbe3ed70d68d9ab24c5613791ebf6c90

Extract the original URL, pre-proxy:

Quote

http://www.cascadeclimbers.com/plab/data/500/2017BakertoRoss30558.JPG

Replace http with https, and remove the www.:

Quote

https://cascadeclimbers.com/plab/data/500/2017BakertoRoss30558.JPG

And you will be able to get the pretty photo.

Edited June 17, 2019 by Marcus Russi

[JasonG]

@Marcus Russi....thanks for that.  @jon fixed the photos!