Photobucket and Others Restricting Service

I never paid a cent and my account is still working. It's been a good ride.
 
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Stelth said:
What villains! They stored hundreds of my pictures for free, for years and now they want compensation?
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I guess you don't understand how these free sites work. They are a draw for advertising. They make millions in advertising revenue by providing an inexpensive (to them) repository for digital images. What Photobucket has done is crippled many forums and blogs, wiped out tons of personal websites and destroyed a lot of small business websites by effectively removing all digital imagery. Now they are attempting to extort millions from these people by charging them to restore those images.
What they claim is 3rd party hosting is nothing of the sort. Every picture posted on every forum or blog is a link back to the PB site and is a potential source of income.
 
I believe your expectations of free services is more than mine is.. I'm just grateful for what I got from them. Did you really think your photos would be stored there for free, forever? You must be constantly disappointed. Be careful of claims from "as seen on TV products"...they don't live up to their promises either.
 
duplicate post due to re-direct
 
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SnG_004.jpg
This pic was posted directly from my PC with no photo hosting site involvement at all. Seems pretty clear to me. I thought all gold members and above could do this??
 
I successfully downloaded all my 1,744 pictures from PhotoBucket to my local computer.

In PhotoBuckets go to Library > Album and on the right hand side under ACTIONS you'll see "Download album". It takes a while so be patient. The pictures will be in a compressed archive zip file.

I suggest everyone who cares about their PB pictures to do the same. You never know if PB goes belly-up.

Also, if you go past your storage limit and if your membership lapses "Photobucket may also delete some or all of Your Content so as to reduce your storage space below the applicable Content Limit, which would result in the conversion of your Plus account to a free account".

"If a free account Member exceeds their Content Limit, their account will be immediately suspended and they will need to become a Paying Member". So, if your free limit is 2GB and you exceed it you'll no longer be able to have a free account.

Also, "Photobucket has the right to change the limits at any time."

Read more: http://photobucket.com/terms
 
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When I first started posting pics on BF, I used Imageshack, it was very simple, and free. Then a couple of years in, they decided they were going to start charging for the service. They promised that all previously uploaded images would still be hosted though. They lied.

Like most users, I didn’t think much to the BF upload software at the time, and the general consensus seemed to be that Photobucket was the way to go, so I set up a PB account, and started using that. PB was OK for a while, but over the years, the problems with it seemed to get worse, so I experimented with other services. I set up an Imgur account a couple of years ago, but didn’t like it so much, so I’ve mainly used it when PB has been down. I’ve also used Google, and one or two others.

Around a year ago, PB just went crazy with pop-up ads, to the point it was virtually unusable, and on the recommendation of one of our mods, I decided to upgrade to an ‘Ad-Free’ account. This was $9.99 a year, but I see it’s stealthily increased to $2.49 a month. Since then though, I’ve not had too many problems with PB – until now! My PB pics are still showing, but how long for remains to be seen.

Imgur seems to be the hosting service people are now recommending, just as they were Photobucket in the past, but I’m unconvinced Imgur won’t behave, in the future, just as Photobucket and Imageshack did. The same goes for Google. The new BF upload software seems to work OK, but it has limitations, and may also be subject to future changes which could kill the pre-existing links.

I think what PB have done is despicable, and I don’t want to give my money to a company who behaves like this, so I guess my pics are going to come down when I kill my account, if not before. I have copies of all my photos stored on my PC, so that's not an issue for me. I mainly post in Traditional, and post a lot of pics there. I’ve also posted a lot of threads in the past which relate to knife history. The only reason I’ve stuck with PB is to keep the pics in those threads in place, but the recent BF software changes have already scrambled the text on mine and every other pre-existing thread. The worst thing about it is that there’s no way to re-edit old threads, where posts exceed the new limit, so even if I upload all my pics to Imgur, I can’t edit the new links into those posts. Editing some of those threads would be a lot of work, but I’d do it if there were a way.
 
Neko2 said:
What's the limit on total pictures you can post)
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I don't what the limit is for gold members. I reached it once, but I had a whole bunch of pics on BF at that time and most weren't relevant anymore. So I deleted them and then I was G-T-G again.

Lone_Wolfe said:
And what happens to the pics you have posted if your membership lapses?
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My BF membership? Don't know... I've never lapsed. And if I do ever go away, I probably won't care what happens to the pics I've posted over the years.
 
Interestingly, I went back to another forum on which I used to be active to check the status of my images there. What I have posted here with photobucket is gone, my (PB) content there is still intact. That's about 12 yrs worth of images there, in comparison to 3 here. Other members have also stated that there images are still showing on some forums, and not others...I wonder why? It would seem that when Photobucket targets an individual's account, it would make sense to just zap everything. Maybe I just looked at content that was prior to their current code scrambling, so it wasn't as easily included? What about platform issues? That other forum is VBulletin. Have people had their hosted images removed from VBulletin forums? Or is it only the more modern platforms, like XenForo that are getting nailed.

As far as the issue of attachment limitations - I don't know what values are in place here...but on the old BF, it was an issue because it was difficult to actually remove them. Aside from that, removing the attachments causes the same disruptions that these broken IMG links cause - the content is lost from the site. Not a big deal if your images are only in ads, or What's in your pocket type threads; but if one puts the effort into meaningful content, stripping that content periodically is not a desirable option.
 
Personally, regarding these PhotoBuckets (PB) shenanigans, there's no difference between a vBulletin nor XenForo run forums.

PB is doing some crazy algorithms perhaps to entice the most dollars in the shortest amount of time or be bought out. They're not endearing themselves to their core customers whose wealth of images has driven the site for so many years.

I now have exact copies of my PB photos but I won't be adding any new ones nor deleting my PB account.

Well, even life is sprinkled/scattered with broken links! :)

One just moves on...
 
So now we cannot see wip's that have photo bucket? I'm just checking. I saw a john white Bowie wip last week and now I cannot find it?? Sorry for the dumb question just asking...
 
Am I the only one expecting that in a few weeks they'll post a statement saying something along the lines of 'we didn't realise there would be so much negative feedback and to show that we listen to our customer base we are dropping the price hugely to only $40 a year for third party hosting'.

They'll make a killing. People will weigh up changing thousands of photos on various forums vs their anger and fold. Even if it's only 50%, they will have made a fortune. If only from the stock price shenanigans it will have caused.

Anyone think I'm just being cynical? :)
 
I don't think you are considering the residual anger. I don't think there will be relief as mush as vitriol (baaaaad swear words :mad::mad:) and a go to hell response. Anyway - remains to be seen if PB will back down. I doubt it.


Ray
 
I posted this in the other threads, but it is worth repeating here.

Thanks to Thurin for pointing out...
Whelp...if you are using..
Using IMGUR is a risk!

I have been seeing a lot of people stating that they use it and will be using it to post photos to forums. As Thurin points out, the Imgur TOS specifically mention this
http://imgur.com/tos

Stuff not to do
If someone else might own the copyright to it, don't upload it. Don't upload gore, "hate speech" (i.e. demeaning race, gender, age, religious or sexual orientation, etc.), or material that is threatening, harassing, defamatory, or that encourages violence or crime. Don't upload illegal content such as child porn or nonconsensual ("revenge") porn. Don't hotlink to adult content or to file-sharing, gambling, torrent, warez, or Imgur rip-off sites. Don't impersonate someone else. Also, don't use Imgur to host image libraries you link to from elsewhere, content for your website, advertising, avatars, or anything else that turns us into your content delivery network. If you do – and we will be the judge – or if you do anything illegal, in addition to any other legal rights we may have, we will ban you along with the site you're hotlinking from, delete all your images, report you to the authorities if necessary, and prevent you from viewing any images hosted on Imgur.com. We mean it.
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With the influx of ex-Photobucket users using Imgur to link photos to forums, I'll bet the bandwidth spike will be enough to draw some attention.​
 
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