Screw Photobucket

4333 Views 71 Replies 22 Participants Last post by Nemo, Jul 31, 2017

moe mensale

Discussion Starter · Jul 9, 2017 (Edited)

For those that haven't heard, Photobucket has, with basically no forewarning, stopped supporting 3rd party hosting. In other words, if you host your pics on Photobucket, you can no longer link to them on another forum, email, etc. Unless, of course, you're willing to pay $400 a year for that privilege. If you don't, all the pics you've ever posted turn into this on 3rd party sites:

Considering how many zillions of linked Photobucket pictures are on the internet, in effect Photobucket just screwed up the continuity of millions of internet threads. The internet is not happy.

Photobucket has a right to make a profit but there are millions of people like myself who have a relatively small handful of pics hosted on PB. $400 per year just isn't sustainable for us and PB isn't offering any other lower cost alternatives. I'm in the process of uploading my pics to "imgur" which still offers the free hosting. Personally, I think PB has just killed themselves with the way they did this.

http://blog.photobucket.com/please-review-latest-changes-photobucket/

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1 - 20 of 72 Posts

Mrs_Esterhouse

· #2 · Jul 9, 2017

Use https://imgur.com for free.

Adam5

· #3 · Jul 9, 2017

How dare they not offer their services for free anymore?

NTA

· #4 · Jul 9, 2017

imgur's terms of service prohibit linking, well not really but they promise to ban you. Lots of talk about this on the photographer blogs.

Photobucket must be up to something, nobody is this dumb. However, the site has been unusable for quite a while due to the dozens of simultaneous ad downloads and displays. It will be interesting to see the $400 fee reduced to something more reasonable as part of the bigger plan ?!

AtlPhilip

· #5 · Jul 9, 2017

If they were smart they would have used this as an opportunity to display interstitial ads.

AzB

· #6 · Jul 9, 2017

Adam5 said:
How dare they not offer their services for free anymore?

I've never used Photobucket, but the main complaint here is that many, many travel threads, diaries, how to threads, etc have been eliminated because of this policy.

Two major problems; First off, they did it overnight with no warning. Second, the price went from free to $400.

If it was $20, or they had some sort of sliding scale for usage that would allow casual users to pay a few bucks a year, and they had some sort of previous warning before making millions of internet threads absolutely useless, there would likely not be any uproar at all.

Nothing wrong with making money. Their procedure for doing so seems to be designed to piss people off. That's not a great way to make money either.

moe mensale

Discussion Starter · #7 · Jul 10, 2017

Adam5 said:
How dare they not offer their services for free anymore?

AzB said:
I've never used Photobucket, but the main complaint here is that many, many travel threads, diaries, how to threads, etc have been eliminated because of this policy.

Two major problems; First off, they did it overnight with no warning. Second, the price went from free to $400.

If it was $20, or they had some sort of sliding scale for usage that would allow casual users to pay a few bucks a year, and they had some sort of previous warning before making millions of internet threads absolutely useless, there would likely not be any uproar at all.

Nothing wrong with making money. Their procedure for doing so seems to be designed to piss people off. That's not a great way to make money either.

AzB hit the essence of the problem. I was using ~3% of my allotted free space. I'd be willing to pay a small annual fee for my miniscule collection of jpegs but that isn't even an option. It was all or nothing. PB really jumped the shark on this. It'll be interesting to see how they - and other 3rd party hosts - respond to the market.

UtiPossidetis

· #8 · Jul 10, 2017

moe mensale said:
AzB hit the essence of the problem. I was using ~3% of my allotted free space. I'd be willing to pay a small annual fee for my miniscule collection of jpegs but that isn't even an option. It was all or nothing. PB really jumped the shark on this. It'll be interesting to see how they - and other 3rd party hosts - respond to the market.

Ditto. No prior notice is the key issue for many, even the companies that hosted photos there for their business websites were given no notice and have had serious impact on their businesses professional presence on the web as a result of this bone-headed move by Photobucket. Several I know have paid what they, yes each of the 3 I know have used the same term, "extortion" of $399 to have their business website intact again.

NTA

· #9 · Jul 10, 2017

This has really wrecked out a whole lot of forums.

UtiPossidetis

· #10 · Jul 10, 2017

NTA said:
This has really wrecked out a whole lot of forums.

I just went and visited a watch enthusiast forum I used to frequent. Wow! It's been eviscerated!

phantoms

· #11 · Jul 10, 2017 (Edited)

Most ISPs used to provide free hosting space for their users but slowly moved out of that practice. This makes it more likely to be at the whims of a third party provider.

Edit: I've went back to a few of the things I posted from Photobucket and they still show. Is it only for new posts?

UtiPossidetis

· #12 · Jul 10, 2017

phantoms said:
Most ISPs used to provide free hosting space for their users but slowly moved out of that practice. This makes it more likely to be at the whims of a third party provider.

Edit: I've went back to a few of the things I posted from Photobucket and they still show. Is it only for new posts?

Interesting question. I know that older posts have been impacted and not just new ones from some of my own posts in the past to the watch forum I referenced. It seems they are going through their accounts in some manner but did not roll this out across the board for all accounts. It also appears to be ongoing because more people are saying they've been caught up in it each day that were fine the day before based on their posts elsewhere.

NTA

· #13 · Jul 11, 2017

Some of the newer forum software makes a copy of the linked photos and from then on serves them up. Storage has become super cheap.

moe mensale

Discussion Starter · #14 · Jul 11, 2017

UtiPossidetis said:
Several I know have paid what they, yes each of the 3 I know have used the same term, "extortion" of $399 to have their business website intact again.

Photobucket's version of ransomware. :bat:

phaed

· #15 · Jul 11, 2017

i remember using photobucket a long time ago. i also remember it becoming more and more complicated to use, so i stopped using it in favor of the other free ones that remain extremely simple. sounds like they are continuing to be the typical company that bloats and make bad decisions until they die.

Aberk

· #16 · Jul 11, 2017

This just totally hosed my basement build thread on the AVS forums.

Jmark

· #17 · Jul 12, 2017

They'll be bankrupt soon imo. If I had anything there I would download it while you can.

68908

· #18 · Jul 12, 2017

Mrs_Esterhouse said:
Use https://imgur.com for free.

:righton:

1911

· #19 · Jul 12, 2017

I pay them $20 per year:

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Archangel

· #20 · Jul 12, 2017

It doesn't look like any of my stuff has been affected, including my signature.

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