Ok i wondered what the first pic on this site was too i tried to go down page by page but that would take too long i was considering asking on the forum i like the pic looks nostalgic in a way.
When you are browsing through pages it tells you there are currently 12,894 pages. So you replace the current page number with this number, and you go straight to the last page:
First, this topic is intended to be "oldest pic by upload date." There are certainly pictures on this site that are older based on the actual date a photographer pressed the button on a camera.
Second, the page numbers of the galleries will change daily as new pics are uploaded, so this is not a good reference. Simply order the gallery by "posted date" and go the very last page (whatever number that is at the time).
Third, site images appear to be numbered sequentially based on upload order.
Now, both of the following pics were uploaded by twunt on Nov 3, 2008:
However, only pic 33 appears as the last image of the final page of the gallery! I think that is a rather interesting quirk.
That's actually a bug that has to do with the total number of images on the site being cached in order to avoid having to recount it on every page load. I looked into this a year or two ago, and I don't remember the details, but in effect it caused the last image to sometimes be displayed in the gallery and sometimes not. It was also surprisingly difficult to fix it while also maintaining the caching, so I didn't fix it at the time.
Cool to know, thanks Chainer!
Just curious: is Pic 31 actually the oldest good upload in the gallery?