(no subject)

[arethinn]

Dear Lazyweb^* (as foxgrrl would say),

Does anyone know why some picture file names on DeviantArt are of obvious and readable forms like Night_fairy_by_Lillucyka.jpg and others come out as hex gibberish like e3e303d151d82974e36b0af65d228309.jpg? (Those happen to be examples from the same user's gallery.)



* -- Actually not that lazy. We've spent about half an hour looking at dA's own help and Googling and trying hex to ASCII or Unicode converters, to no avail. It does not seem to be related to deviation age, length of title, mature filtering, print availability, or anything else we can think of.

Comments

[starlightforest.livejournal.com]

Um, ok, but why would a file uploaded by a logged-in user to their own gallery be "anonymous"?

[michiexile]

I dunno. :-)

[starlightforest.livejournal.com]

Errr....okay, so, excuse the rude tone as I really intend mere perplexity, but this is an ultimately inapplicable explanation for how arbitrary DeviantArt files would acquire these odd filenames?

[michiexile]

I'm in no way involved in DA, I don't hang out there, and I only very rarely end up even following links there. In your post above, you said:

We've spent about half an hour looking at dA's own help and Googling and trying hex to ASCII or Unicode converters, to no avail. It does not seem to be related to deviation age, length of title, mature filtering, print availability, or anything else we can think of.

and I tried to point out that in high probability there IS a relation to the MD5 fingerprint of the file.

However, I still have no idea WHY DA uses this for some files, I have no idea what makes some files named with MD5 and others with original names. Since I don't use the website, I haven't seen their upload dialogues, and thus couldn't possibly remember subtle parts of those that might end up generating anonymous files; and you seemed to have done a check for whether this is correlated with time, so it doesn't seem to be due to an upgrade in the backend software.

I never did intend to give you a complete solution, since I don't have one to give. I did intend to give you a suggestion of what might cause the "hex gibberish" filenames.