- Is it not possible to redirect the old (broken) links to the new - instead of generating a 403 ERROR (## The request could not be satisfied.) and displaying the “alt” text
It is unfortunately not possible. Some images have been moved, others have not, and there isn’t any way to apply logic to redirect only the ones that have.
- Is it possible to search for and get a dump of broken links, so assuming that “1” is not possible, at least I can find all my broken links and manually replace ‘static.inaturalist.org’ with ‘inaturalist-open-data.s3.amazonaws.com ’ to activate them.
In short - this kind of search is not possible. You can use the “Description / Tags” advanced search filter for searching observation bodies, but not for comments.
Going forward, I’d recommend linking to an observation or photo page URL rather than embedding an image URL. Page URLs are also not guaranteed to work 100% of the time (for example we have had a partner change domains leading to lots of broken links that required manual fixing), but they will be more stable than photos, whose URLs will change depending on the license of the photo.
But what will happen next time the pictures are moved to a new server?
While we try to maintain consistent URLs as much as possible, keeping things in the same place, forever accessible by the same URLs is not something we promise. If you embed URLs of photos, there is no guarantee they will always resolve, if the photos is hosted by iNaturalist or otherwise. As recommended above, I’d link to a details page instead of embedding an image.