Photobucket

[MiniDave]

I'm sure everyone is now well aware of what Photobucket did - charging $400/year if you want to link your photos to a 3rd party site, like this one.

Not only has it affected decades worth of forum threads all over the world, but there are/were a large number of Ebay, Amazon and Etsy sellers who posted images of the goods they were selling on these sites from PB too, and all of those images are gone as well......so not only have they disrupted their own site, but millions of sites all around the world - it's a real mess.

I've taken advantage of Dan's liberal allowance to post photos here and I have shared a few of them from here to a few other places, I hope I haven't caused any undue expense from this practice.

Some forums are concerned not only at the loss of historical date and expertise, but that their forum may simply die because of the PB debacle.

Many are rushing to other hosts such as Imgur and Flickr and others, but I fear that's only a stopgap, and if PB's ransomware approach works because folks simply can't recreate their threads, other hosting sites may do something similar.

This has been a concern of mine every since the "cloud" became a thing.....you put all of you important pics and papers up there, and then how do you keep them from doing something like this? At what point do you just decide to pay the fee as it's almost impossible to recreate what you already did on another site?

BTW, Facebook is not the answer, while the images do remain on your page, ones you have linked will soon disappear from places you've shared them and you'll have to do what PB users are doing, recreate threads with photos hosted somewhere else, or simply let those threads die.

So, what are some of you going to do with your photo accounts?

[Jims5543]

I was a heavy PB user, I have about 12 years of photos on there. About 6,000 when I stopped counting.

Yup they did a good one to me.

I lost nothing, every pic I have on there is backed up redundantly on two portable hard drives and now, I have my own personal cloud server in my office that backs up my phone every time it is in the wifi.

They have made a huge mess and demanded an unreasonable amount of money to be 3rd party.

As I said somewhere else when I saw what they did, I thought to myself, yeah, that is a reasonable ask from a free service, I know I could have paid from 50-70 a year to have my pics hosted (either my own website or a service) so I was prepared to dole out 70 bux give or take.

$400 was out of line and to be honest, they lost me even if they now offer it 50-70 bucks, I am done with them.

I have deleted 80% of my photos from there, the last 20% will be completed this week while I am on vacation.

Then I am sending them a FU letter and deleting my account.

I have to admit, I am pretty chuffed and a bit defeated by this. I will go back and replace some photos but doubt I will have time to find every post and fix every picture.

I am going to host my mini pics here and my personal crap on Smugmug for now.

I am still deciding what to do, I think I am going to get a domain and host my own pics which is what I used to do in the 90's and early 2000's before You Tube and Fuckyoubucket existed.

[MPlayle]

I don't take "tons" of pictures to start with, so I've not had much worry.  I did have a few hosted with another (now defunct) hosting service for sharing. 

Now, I upload to albums on this site for posting in any threads here.  That way they are always with the thread/forum where their context is used.

I would do that over on the MOT site as well, though over there some are now broken due to deleting old stuff to fix some hosting limits we ran into a little while back (whole complicated story on that one).

Otherwise, I keep them on a personal drive and share directly as wanted by emailing copies to those that want them.

[jeff10049]

Done and FU letter sent as well. Took all day do DL what wasn't already backed up I will keep all photos in two places from now on. That was always my intent but slipped up a few years back and had a computer crash leaving photos on fubucket only oh well this forced me to DL them and back up with Google and on my external drive so I'm good to go.

[LilDrunkenSmurf]

I stopped using photobucket years ago. I've been using a mix of imgur and flickr since.

[MiniDave]

Posted Yesterday, 02:11 PM  on the Mini Forum UK by Matt Brighton

I have found a workaround that allows the original posts to be viewed as intended. It is a chrome extension that automatically redirects the photobuckets links to allow the images to be displayed....https://chrome.googl...her-info-dialog

They have also created a way for a forum administrator to re-write all the old urls on the entire forum to direct them to automatically copied images on Imgur, this would be against Imgur's TOCs though!!

I have tried the extension and it works, so if I come across a thread that I need to see images on I can toggle the extension on or off at will

[Jims5543]

After seeing Aces Lows photos hosted on FU Bucket I took a look to see what is up.

I found this article. As far as I am concerned I will never use them again, I deleted everything and sent them an FU Letter.

They could go free again and I would still not use them. I am very happy with Smugmug.


Photobucket restores photos "taken hostage," hopes to lure back customers with cheaper plans after last year's $399 debacle
By Tamara Chuang | The Denver Post
PUBLISHED: May 17, 2018


The company, which became one of the nation's largest photo-sharing sites in the early 2000s, said Thursday that it wants to do "the right thing for customers" and dropped hosting fees to $2.49 a month or $24.99 a year.

CEO John Corpus is no longer with the company. Ted Leonard, who joined the company last fall as its finance officer, became CEO in March 2018.
After seeing Aces low hosting on FU Bucket I took a look seems they know they stepped on their dicks, most likely too late now. I deleted everything and sent them a FU letter.  Even if they went back to free I would not go back.


The new plans are:
Free: Photo sharing and ad-supported storage only. Still NO third-party hosting on the Free plan.
Basic: 2 gigabytes of photo storage and ad free hosting for $2.49 a month
Intermediate: 20 GBs of photo storage for $3.99 a month
Expert: 2 terabytes of photo storage for $8.99 a month
Add third-party hosting to the intermediate or expert plans for $2.49 more per month


Full story:
https://www.denverpost.com/2018/05/17/photobucket-image-hosting-plans/

[MPlayle]

Add to the complaints against them: they are watermarking pictures under the "third-part hosting" category.

All of the pictures that re-appeared in Aceslow's pickup thread have a "hosted by" watermark very largely overlaid.

[94touring]

It's been a royal pita doing web research this past year and running into countless image not found due to photobucket.