If you’ve been worried about how you’re going to upload explicit images from your desktop to Reddit after Imgur’s ban and purge takes place on May 15, you can now rest easy. On Thursday, Reddit started allowing not safe for work (NSFW) images to be uploaded from desktops to communities limited to users ages 18 and up, as spotted by TechCrunch.

“This now gives us feature parity with our mobile apps, which (as you know) already has this functionality,” Reddit’s announcement on the r/modnews subreddit says.

As of May 15, image-hosting site Imgur will no longer allow nudity, pornography, or sexually explicit content and remove any images that fall under that umbrella.

The expected impact is noteworthy, considering Imgur’s decades-long reputation for hosting all sorts of high-resolution images. It’s also notable to Redditors who dabble in naughty postings. Although Reddit started allowing users to directly upload images to the site in 2016, many users still used Imgur for their explicit imagery needs. The developer of third-party Reddit client Apollo, upon hearing about Imgur’s upcoming ban, noted that Imgur had been the “main place for NSFW Reddit image uploads, since Reddit didn’t allow explicit uploads from the desktop.” But with Imgur days away from a grand purge, (including inactive content not tied to Imgur user accounts), Reddit will pick up the capability, providing its desktop users with an option.

In April, Reddit announced that it will “limit access to mature content via our Data API as part of an ongoing effort to provide guardrails to how sexually explicit content and communities on Reddit are discovered and viewed.” When asked this week if the enabling of explicit image desktop uploads meant users would be able to upload images through the API, a Reddit admin said this is something Reddit is “still discussing.”

Apollo’s developer responded by saying the developer community would be appeased with the ability to access NSFW subreddits “in some capacity.”

Regardless, Reddit’s new policy won’t sit well with anti-porn groups like The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (formerly Morality in Media). As reported by Vice earlier this month, the group, highlighting concerns around explicit content involving or being seen by children and sexual abuse victims, was already urging Reddit to update its policies, including by implementing “strong policies against hardcore pornography and sexually explicit content, due to the inability for Reddit to ever sufficiently verify the age or consent of people depicted in such content” and to “ban users who upload sexually explicit material.”

Disclosure: Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder in Reddit.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1939081