HashSpace was started in 2008 and from 2008 until 2015, HashSpace was run on a third-party social network service named Ning (I refer to this as HashSpace version 1). In 2015, we were forced off Ning due to rising costs as they were going to start charging based on the number of members and amount of disk space used. We had a lot, and I mean A LOT, of photos uploaded (and Ning didn’t actually resize any photos so they took up a lot of space) so our price was going from $60 per month to $1000 per month. I like you all, but I don’t like you that much 😄.  So we had to pivot in an effort to keep HashSpace alive and move to other software on servers we controled. The problem with Ning was that since they controlled everything, we didn’t have easy access to the data. They provided an export tool but it was painfully slow and even after weeks of exporting data, they eventually shut us off. I was able to download about 400,000 pics from 2015-2010 and a partial file that mapped those pics to owners. The problem was that mapping file was so large and not complete that my computer at the time could not handle doing anything with it so the the photos just sat on an external hard drive in my office with no ability to organize.
ChatGPT to the Rescue!
With the revitalization of HashSpace this year and a better computer, I decided to take another look the v1 photo situation just to see if there was anything I could do. Well, the photos and mapping file were still a mess but now I had a helper that could actually do something about it – ChatGPT. Â I fed part of the mapping file into ChatGPT along with what I was trying to do and after a few iterations of the prompts, ChatGPT provided me with a solution to extract the exact data I needed and put it in an Excel file! I was then able to get all the photos resized and re-arranged into folders associated with their actual owners.
HashSpace Photos from 2010-2015… available if you want them
If you uploaded photos to HashSpace from 2010-2015, there is a chance that I may have them. If you didn’t save those photos elsewhere and are interested in getting them back, enter your email address in the form below to check to see whether I have any photos that you uploaded. If I do, just contact me to and I’ll send you a link to your directory. Â And in case you were wondering, “The International Virgin” was the upload king/queen with 12,939 photos that I have, followed closely be “DickRectory Challenged” with 12,035!
