Important: Google Image Charts will be turned off soon

[Jon Orwant]

Google Image Charts -- not to be confused with Google Charts -- is the free service at chart.googleapis.com that creates static charts.

Its deprecation was announced back in 2012, so in theory nobody should be using it now that it's 2019. 

Several technical dependencies have made maintaining Google Image Charts unsustainable going forward, so it will be turned off on March 14, 2019.

There is no effective way to identify or contact users of the service other than this group, so to alert them we will be creating outages: first a short one, and then a longer one.

The short outage will be for an hour on Wednesday, February 13, at approximately 1pm Eastern Standard Time.

The long outage will be for several hours on Tuesday, March 5, at approximately 10am Eastern Standard Time.

If you are still using Google Image Charts, we recommend:

• Switching to Google Charts, an actively developed JavaScript library for interactive charts and can render many common chart types as static PNGs. However, Google Image Charts provides some "charts" that Google Charts does not, such as QR codes, LaTeX equations, and road signs. For those we have no suggested replacement.

• Using another charting library such as D3 or Dygraphs (both JavaScript).

• Generating all the charts you'll ever need before March 14 and storing them yourself. (Many users of Google Image Charts create the same exact chart over and over, which is slower and more wasteful than generating the chart once and storing it locally.)

On a personal note, I've enjoyed maintaining the service over the years, and I'm happy to have watched the much more powerful Google Charts leapfrog it in capability.

Jon

[rs64....@gmail.com]

Thanks for the update Jon.

Question : would you know of any other similar alternative ?

I need to display bar / pie / line charts on emails.

Email clients provide minimalistic JavaScript capability and so using any JS-based solution like Google Charts or D3 won't cut it.

Sach.

[Jon Orwant]

On Monday, February 18, 2019 at 10:58:11 PM UTC-5, rs64....@gmail.com wrote:

Thanks for the update Jon.

Question : would you know of any other similar alternative ?

Hi Sach,

I'm not endorsing these solutions and have no experience with any of them, but perhaps they'll help you:

• ChartURL
• Image-Charts
• Parse.ly blog post on using PhantomJS and D3.js in email
• Knowtify post on how to embed D3.js charts in email

 Jon

[Sachin Khambadkone]

Awesome thanks !

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[lped...@google.com]

HI Sach,

Did you find a suitable solution? We also use Google Image Charts for emails and need to find a suitable replacement. Thanks!

Cheers,

Luis

[Sachin Khambadkone]

Hi,

Yes - we've been using image-charts.com and so far so good !

Sach.

[Luis Pedroza]

Awesome. Thanks so much!

[Jay Ashe]

How long will the long outage be for?

[Jon Orwant]

Google Image Charts will be turned back on between 2pm and 3pm today. It will stay up until March 14 at which point it will be shut off forever.

Jon

[Brandon Byers]

Howdy! 

I would like to say thank you for providing this service ... and then, for keeping it available 7 years past the deprecation date. My business has found it immensely useful for our internal site, email, PDFs etc. 

Vaya con Dios! We wish you all the best. 

[gga...@fgribreau.com]

We've made Image-charts.com years ago as a drop-in replacement for Google Image Charts and we support animated charts (gifs) as well!

Try us, it's free (with a small watermark) and we've got paying subscriptions to remove the watermark :)

[Nicholas Sadowy]

Is there an "easy" alternative dynamic push pin generator to replace what was available via http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chst=d_map+pin_letter&chld=1|00FF00|FFFFFF?

[david.mend...@gmail.com]

I am looking for a solution to this as well! https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chst=d_map_spin&chld=.85|0|EA4335|10|b|10

[Tom Baverstock]

does anyone know an alternative for QR code generation? The Gooogle replacement doesn't have this 

[Stuart Kiely]

I just tried porting over to http://goqr.me/api/

looks like a viable alternative. 

[Tom Baverstock]

thanks, looks good, I'll pass that over to my dev

[Andre Madarang]

I am also looking for an alternative for this. One of my apps makes heavy use of this and I have yet to find an alternative. If has anyone suggestions, let us know! Example URL: https://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chst=d_map_spin&chld=0.90|0|9999FF|12|_|A2

[Mike Karikas]

One alternative we're looking at is Eastwood Charts, which says it uses the same parameters as Google Image Charts, though we haven't been successful in getting it running yet.  Has anybody tried this?

A couple links:

http://www.jfree.org/eastwood/ - project homepage

https://sourceforge.net/projects/eastwood/ - project files

https://github.com/geosolutions-it/eastwood-charts - project files on github that appear to be incomplete

[Ian Webster]

Hi all,

With Google Image Charts shutting down, I created https://quickchart.io/ to provide image charts for free and without a watermark.  You can use the quickchart.io service or run your own server as the project is open source.

[Wind Power Surf Shop]

Good day google image charters,

Thanks to google for providing this service for years.  It really produces some nice graphs and worked well for plotting weather data in our applications.  http://www.windpowerweather.com

I would hope google could leave the documentation for Google Image charts up past Mar 14.  It is a good reference while implementing new charting system.

We use a lot of dynamic icons and map_spin for wind direction for example: http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chst=d_map_spin&chld=0.8|14|67C8FF|10|_|NNW

Image-charts.com returns an error on 'chem' parameter, does not support dual axis and is not a 'drop-in' replacement in our case.  D3 looks good, but probably a fair amount of work to implement. 

Has anyone find dynamic icon / marker support?  

Here is one of our graphs:  http://www.windpowerweather.com/wx_graph_wind_sample.php?view=24hr&debug=false

If you change the debug param to true, you can see the chart parameters at bottom of page.

Any help would be appreciated.

Wind Power Surf Shop

Lake Winnebago, Fond du Lac, WI

[Sachin Khambadkone]

Hi,

I've been scoping out image-charts.com and so far so good.

However, I did stumble upon a bug today :

https://image-charts.com/chart?cht=p&chd=t:45,49,1587&chs=300x250&chco=FEA0A0,FFFF93,99CB99&chl=45|49|1587&chm=N,777777,0,,12,,c&chan=

Sachin.

[Sarbjeet Singh]

There does not seem to be any easy replacement for dynamic icons. 

Anyone found anything for this. 

here at the below link it does not say that it is shutting off on 14th March. 

https://developers.google.com/chart/infographics/docs/dynamic_icons

Could you please confirm if it is also going down?

Regards,

Sarbjeet Singh 

[Jon Orwant]

Yes, the infographics are going down too. Basically, any use of chart.googleapis.com will stop working.

I'll add a more explicit warning to that portion of the web site; thanks for pointing out the ambiguity.

Jon

[Aron Kansal]

We plan to switch to:
http://goqr.me/api/
Just not sure what the terms are.

I don't see a pricing page and also it does not confirm that it's free.

I'd prefer to know what the usage limits are in case I run into future issues.

[Aron Kansal]

Stuart - are you nervous that the price and usage is not listed?

[Sarbjeet Singh]

Thanks for the confirmation. 

[Ryan Chadwick]

They do mention on their site (http://goqr.me/)  that it is free. "QR codes created on goQR.me are completely free of charge (commercial and print usage allowed, including advertising)." I think if you want a colored QR code, they do charge a fee for that. 

[Ryan Chadwick]

Is anyone for sure that the QR code API will be shut off, or is it only the Dynamic Icons? https://developers.google.com/chart/infographics/docs/dynamic_icons is the only page that explicitly says it will be shut off on March 14, 2019. The other pages, just mention that the API is deprecated.

[Jon Orwant]

Yes, I can confirm that the QR codes will no longer be available. Anything involving a chart.googleapis.com URL will stop working.

Jon

--

[gga...@fgribreau.com]

We've built and released a QR Code and drop-in-replacement for Google Image Charts at Image-Charts.com:

https://image-charts.com/chart?chs=150x150&cht=qr&chl=Hello%20world&choe=UTF-8

Let us know your feedbacks so we can improve it 🏆!

Documentation and watermark for free usage are also coming !

[gga...@fgribreau.com]

We've looked into this and the rendering is the same (proportions are equal):

Image-Charts rendering

https://image-charts.com/chart?cht=p&chd=t:45,49,1587&chs=300x250&chco=FEA0A0,FFFF93,99CB99&chl=45%7C49%7C1587&chm=N,777777,0,,12,,c&chan=

vs

Google-Image Charts rendering

https://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p&chd=t:45,49,1587&chs=300x250&chco=FEA0A0,FFFF93,99CB99&chl=45%7C49%7C1587&chm=N,777777,0,,12,,c

 (also note the missing 1 in the 1587 label, that Image-Charts.com handles for you 👌)

[Sachin Khambadkone]

Ah apologies - I wasn't aware image-charts.com was setup to simply mimic google as closely as possible.

Thanks for the response - guess I'll have to look elsewhere,

Sach.

[Aron Kansal]

I hate to say this, but api.qrserver.com is not ready for the amount of traffic that is coming their way.

We are getting errors from them.

A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly

respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because

connected host has failed to respond 85.10.204.194:443

2nd Level Domain: titanium.net-no.de

[gga...@fgribreau.com]

@Sachin it's because you Google Image Charts "t:" format, your dataset is 45,49,1597 in "t:" format, thus it means that "values above 100 are truncated to 100" (both valid in Google Image Charts and Image-Charts documentation).

However in Image-Charts.com we implemented what we call the "awesome data format" ("a:") that does not truncate values higher than 100:

https://image-charts.com/chart?cht=p&chd=a:45,49,1587&chs=300x250&chco=FEA0A0,FFFF93,99CB99&chl=45%7C49%7C1587&chm=N,777777,0,,12,,c

Enjoy!

[Sachin Khambadkone]

Now that's a far better response than the previous.

Thanks - still scoping out image-charts :-)

Sach.

[Brandon Byers]

@image-charts - thank you for that distinction, regarding the "t" format and your "a" format. 

Regards, 

Brandon Byers Refund Retriever, LLC P  800-441-8085 E  bra...@refund-retriever.com W  www.refund-retriever.com

[Stuart Kiely]

we found the same re: load issues w/ api.qrserver.com. Switched to image-charts.com and so far so good