After lashing out at Amazon for moving the images to books used by Associates, I got a response. Here is their defense.
It seems that you are using a Third party application to build your links. If that is the case you need to contact them about links breaking.
We offer online automated link-generating tools in Associates Central for the exclusive use of our Associates.
My response is, of course I’m using a 3rd party application to build my links. It is my application. I wrote it, because your crappy tools are incapable of generating valid XHTML code. I’ve even emailed you guys on how to fix your tools, but that fix was deemed to be a difficult task. Your words. Closing tags and lowercase are taught in beginner HTML classes these days.
But that is beside the point. The data used to build my links came from the Amazon API. My application asks Amazon directly for that information. I wrote my tool to conform with all their security requirements to retrieve the data needed to build those links. The links point to image files on Amazon servers. How is that the problem of the link building tool? FACT: Amazon is moving images on their own server. The paths to those images come directly from the Amazon API.
Here is what I am going to do to solve the problem. I am going to update the code on my Build Amazon Link With Image application. Since I can only be guaranteed that the image path is valid at the time I make the call, I will make a copy of the product image and host it on my server. Then the link built will point to the product on Amazon, but the image will be on my server. I am not happy with this solution, because it means that if the product media gets updated, my image file will be stale. But, I’d much rather have a stale image than a broken image link.
