Gen Image Hosting

Private User

Scott, I dont know if you or anyone else can shed any light about what is behind the recent changes to image hosting at Geni.

I cant find any documentation or notification of this change anywhere but it appears that the image hosting for Geni images has moved from photos.geni.com to media.geni.com

This is all fair enough, but has come combined with a change of image URL to add a hash parameter such that such a URL now looks like https://media.geni.com/p13/be/b0/0a/b1/5344485ec88caa63/craig_miles...

Presumably the hash has been added as some kind of security device although I am not really sure of the thinking behind that?

I have found that if the hash is not utilised on the image URL then an access error is returned.

Furthermore I have discovered today that the hash used for a given image is not persistent.

Yesterday, the URL for the same image above was
https://media.geni.com/p13/be/b0/0a/b1/5344485ec88caa63/craig_miles...

While the photo URLs are returned as before via the API, except now with the hash extension, the URL can no longer be utilised in any practical way. This clearly then stops usage of the URL from providing an image for a given ancestor to any resource external to Geni.

Is this change deliberate? If so why? And why has this been done seemingly secretly? I understand that it is not something that would affect most users but clearly anyone using the API would be likely to notice.

As a result I now have all of the images missing from my external representation of my ancestor tree.

Is there any workaround to allow the image URL to be used without the hash or to get around the constantly changing hash value?

Thanks

Craig