Hitting Rate Limit much before 12,500...?

[amg...@gmail.com]

Hey Imgur team (and other users),

I'm a bit new to Imgur and did search the forums / the API docs before posting here... thanks much in advance for your help!

I'm developing a site (free, no ads) at my end that is linking to imgur images ie no uploads, simply accessing data. Right now, I am issuing requests using the API to get pictures for ~1,000 Reddit posts. The API docs says the daily request limit is 12,500 but I am getting "user limit reached" with a little over ~1,200 requests. Could you advise me? Is there a rate limit per minute, say only 10 requests per minute?

[amg...@gmail.com]

Hi, been 3 days and the guidance would still be very useful to me so just bubbling it up. Thank you!

[Alan Schaaf]

Hey, sorry for the late response. It sounds like you're IP address is being limited, which is different from the daily limit. Looking at the docs I realized we don't have solid data on how many requests you're allowed to have on a single IP, so apologies for that. I'll get it updated asap.

There's a 500 request per hour limit on the user's IP address. That's what the "user limit" reached error message is about. If you were hitting the daily requests then the error would be changed to "daily request limit exceeded".

We also limit each user (via their IP Address) for each application, this is to ensure that no single user is able to spam an application. This limit will simply stop the user from requesting more data for an hour. We recommend that each application takes precautions against spamming by implementing rate limiting on their own applications. Each response will also include the remaining credits for each user in the X-RateLimit-UserLimit HTTP header.

[amg...@gmail.com]

Ah I see, thanks for updating the docs.

If I use the paid API will I still have this 500 requests / hr limit?

Is there some way, say by paying or whitelisting, that would allow me to have a higher limit?

[amg...@gmail.com]

Alan (or anyone else), does the 500 limit also decrease per hour? If I were to do 1500 requests would it take 3 hours, or more?

I appreciate any guidance on how to get around this limit for just a bit or confirmation that the paid API doesn't have this issue.

Thanks!

[Alan Schaaf]

It gets reset every 60 minutes, starting from when the first call takes place. For example if at 4:31pm you do your first API call, then at 5:31pm it will be reset. If you wanted to do 1500 requests then you would need to span them out over a 3 hour time period, or use the authenticated API with a pro account (which has a much higher hourly limit).

The commercial API does not have this limit.