This is a composite recovery of VCL, created from a combination of the Wayback Machine archive and a crawl of the site from when it was still functional. It contains as much of the site's images and files as could be recovered - almost all. It does not, however, contain the metadata - the dates, or the short text descriptions.

It is created without permission from the operator of VCL, Ch'marr, because said operator has vanished entirely off of the face of the internet. VCL eventually failed because no-one was monitoring the database service, and then the site died entirely.

In the interests of ease of re-hosting and preservation, the following alterations have been made:

- All JPEGs optimised losslessly, GIFs converted to PNG, and then all non-animated PNGs converted to WebP. This was performed using the script minuimus.pl in order to reduce the size of the collection for ease of preservation and re-hosting.

- Many files have also been renamed for technical reasons - usually because they were a potential source of problems. Filenames containing " characters, or files which were distinct but differed only in case and would collide if subjected to a case-insensitive filesystem, or files which have mangled characters in the name due to predating Unicode, or files ending in a . character. All manner of problem filenames that would just invite cross-platform troubles. Some files even had a space character at the end.

- A small number of files in formats so dated as to be hard to read with modern software have also been converted, such as rgb555-format AVI files, or WordPerfect documents. Some of the DOC files are now .odt, but that's more a side-effect of some other processing. DOC is... unpleasant.

- An automated duplicate-substitution process identified files which share the same contents (pixel-for-pixel) and replaced the larger one with the smaller.

- Some duplicated files within the same artist folder have been removed. Some artist folders which contain entirely or almost entirely duplicated files have been merged. I believe these are an artifact the archive.org recovery technique. You can recognise them by my adding 'AKA' in the folder name.

- Mysterious DLL files removed because there is no way to determine what they do.

- Some zip files containing only single text files have been extracted for ease of in-browser viewing. With modern web servers supporting transparent compression, there's no reason for it anyway. Zip files containing multiple text files are left as-is, reflecting the intent of the artist to bundle those files together.

- Files present under 'authors' have been removed from 'artists' as part of the deduplication process.

- A large number of JPEG files (only those which were compressed at the highest-quality settings) have been converted to AVIF. The technique used to carry this out is more sophisticated than a simple image conversion, and should introduce only an insignificent and undetectable level of degredation to the image quality. Most will actually come out looking better due to the advanced deblocking filter used when decoding the JPEG.

This rather aggressive approach to optimisation and size reduction has significently reduced the size, which makes it so cheap to host that I'm happy to do so indefinitely. Doesn't even need seperate thumbnails any more - the images are tiny enough to be their own thumbs.

Why AVIF? Because it's time the world moved to a new next-gen image format, and I believe AVIF is the best candidate. It's got the superior performance, the full feature set, and thanks to the backing of the corporate giant Google, it's supported now by every web browser worth knowing on every platform.