Dear Photobucket, Rot in Hell

[SternWake]

All of a sudden they say that in order to post photos to forums such as these that were are uploaded to their site, one must  subscribe and pay them.

As if the horribly slow and unrelaiable uploads, and annoying ads, and frustrating format were so special that one should pay to have the privelage of being irritated annoyed and have their time wasted, while trying to sell your photos to anyone willing to buy them with no profit to the photo taker uploader........

Screw you Photobucket. 

Since all those photos I have uploaded in all those threads over the years will no longer show up, well I apologize to readers/ attempted viewers of them. 

 I am not sure of the fee they are charging nor will I investigate, but I am about to click delete my account and find a new photo host.

 

[WalkaboutTed]

You're kinder than I would be.
Ted

 

[Gary68]

http://imgur.com/

i switch to imgur when photobucket ads made it unusable

 

[Gary68]

well,crap,the first half of my build thread was on photobucket
https://vanlivingforum.com/Thread-The-Fat-Van

hopefully i can down load those images and re upload to imgur

 

[Gary68]

photos downloaded and account deleted

 

[Optimistic Paranoid]

You're having quite the week this week, Stern.

Deep breaths.

This too shall pass.

 

[jimindenver]

oh man, I have thousands of photos on there.

 

[CautionToTheWind]

Unfortunately, that's what most if not all hosting sites do, eventually.

 

[Queen]

oh man, I have thousands of photos on there.

Similar, I have hundreds, at least.  Very frigging annoying.

 

[BradKW]

Wow, this sucks...nearly every photo I've ever posted is now gone unless I pay. I can't even find out how much it'd be because their normally-laggy site is non-functional atm.

On the bright side, I believe I have everything backed up on Google pics. Too bad linking to Google pics doesn't work for majority of people.

Photobucket was only usable for me with AdBlock enabled, and I often wondered how such a huge storage-intensive service like that could actually make money. With a move like this, it seems likely they weren't...the free service side likely wasn't tempting enough people to purchase products or service upgrades. Can't say I'm surprised really. Fair to say, there's probably a good reason forums like this won't allow direct user uploads, and it probably comes down to money.

I will consider paying the new fee depending on what it is for two reasons: 1) I've been receiving a service for free which I find value in, and 2) I believe it's likely that others (such as imagur) will end up going this route in the future. But at the moment, I don't even know what the fee actually is...I could see this disrupting their site for some time to come.

I also wonder if there's any possibility of the mods being able to allow editing on a situational basis...inserting photo links from a new hosting site would be greatly preferred over attempting to re-create entire build journals and such.

It sucks, but I'm trying not to be too pissed about it...it feels like a desperate move on PB's end that probably indicates financial problems. Either that, or some moron thought that generating this level of negative press would pay off...

 

[squatting dog]

curious if this works. test pic from photo bucket. can anyone see it?

 

[Queen]

^^^^ Yup, it's showing.

 

[Queen]

I just posted in the humor thread from PB, seemed to work fine. Maybe they're rolling this out slowly and not everyone is impacted yet?

 

[KathyC]

I agree with BradKW that they are probably in financial difficulty and it's a desperate move. The fact that they didn't bother to notify their users before they made the change, and consequently broke links to a gazillion images speaks volumes as to the company condition/leadership. I also downloaded my images and deleted my account.

 

[Ballenxj]

This is a topic we have been discussing for the last couple days on other sites. It seems they are demanding $399. if you want to link your PB images to other sites. They are calling it third party hosting. Read more about it in the link below.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/354711/photobucket-breaks-image-links-across-the-internet

 

[Spaceman Spiff]

I've always loaded pictures directly from my computer.  From my picture folder when in Windows XT and from the desktop when in Sierra.  I know they show up because others have commented on them.

Gary68's first page pictures are not available, last page are.  Random pictures from 'Humorous' thread are showing up.

I don't want to entrust my stuff to a third party, paid or not.  Flash is so cheap now that I can have multiple copies of my pictures scattered around.

From my Mac:


 -- Spiff

 

[tx2sturgis]

I also downloaded my images and deleted my account.

I'm trying to do exactly this!

Years ago in the myspace days, you had to have an image hosting site to do much of anything on myspace.

So 20 years ago, I opened a photobucket account and I have a lot of images there, just sitting, for all of this time.

My email address has changed, (screw you yahoo!) and photobucket does not recognize my password, so maybe the account has been hacked, or deleted...I dunno...I have not logged in for probably more than at least 5 years.

I have tried the password recovery and nada..

I have sent an email to support....

I will probably get nowhere. We shall see.

For this and most forums I just compress most images to less than 100k (which is tiny) and just let the forum host the pictures.

 

[Dennis]

PB has been more dysfunctional than usual this morning. Let me try one.



PB says says no third party hosting on free accounts. It still gives instructions on posting to forums and blogs though.

 

[rvpopeye]

All my photos have always existed on 2 computers and a external HDD as well as a bunch of SD cards where they started out in my little Canon P&S.

No 3rd party cloud crap can ever make me feel like they are as or more secure than right where they are now!

 

[BradKW]

If $399 for 3rd party links is accurate, that smells like a last gasp money grab more than a business model restructuring. Will wait till the dust settles and decide then...