Get the original image from Imgur URLs with "maxwidth", "shape", and "fidelity"

Question

Imgur doesn't seem to give out the original image for some images, for example, https://i.sstatic.net/P4cLI.jpg?maxwidth=123456789&shape=thumb&fidelity=high

The problem is that I bet "shape=thumb" and "fidelity=high" are downgrading the original image.

Does not give me the original:
https://i.sstatic.net/P4cLI.jpg

Does not exist:
https://imgur.com/hJCEq8P_d
https://imgur.com/a/hJCEq8P_d

https://i.sstatic.net/P4cLI.jpg would be it in an ideal world, but it is not.

Is there a fidelity higher than "high"? Is there a shape better than "thumb"? I just want the original image or the best possible version of it, and Imgur is jerking me around and stupidly wasting my time by not giving me that.

Answer 1

Remove the "_d":

https://i.sstatic.net/VmSWP.jpg

has a better quality than

https://i.imgur.com/hJCEq8P_d.jpg?maxwidth=123456789&shape=thumb&fidelity=high

I think that Imgur idioticly compresses all JPEGs uploaded there, so the JPEG file on a user's hard drive and the Imgur-uploaded version of that file are not bit-identical and the online version is lower quality. My point is that I guess the actual original image is unreachable unless it is linked in the image's description on the Imgur page.

Answer 2

Ok so after further testing, and just for the sanity of anyone else looking into this just like I was: the best quality image you can save off Imgur seems to be a PNG with "_d" after the imgcode filename (i.e. "01234_d.png"), maxwidth set to something high like 10000, and fidelity set to "high". So for example: https://i.imgur.com/F973T_d.png?maxwidth=10000&fidelity=high

More info and testing notes can be found here: https://github.com/ImguRandom/ImguRandom.com/wiki/Imgur-API-Shit