PHOTO bucket

[Brian Rupnow]

I've been using Photobucket for 7 years now, and paying about $40 a year for my account. If they jack the price to $400 a year, about 8000 of my pictures are going to disappear of all of the forums.----Brian

 

[ozzie46]

Brian I was able to get all of my pics off of PB, but have not been able to retrieve my Videos. All my pics are on my computer now.

Of course I only had about 300 pics there, not thousands.

Ron

 

[Cogsy]

Owning your own host isn't cost free either, especially if you sign up with a provider and an account that doesn't have bandwidth limitations. In many cases it would be cheaper to pay PB $400 a month. The so called free hosting sites can be extremely limited.

Beyond all of that managing your own domain and host isn't a trivial activity. Especially when you consider hackers and other concerns with server management.

I'm not sure when the last time you checked pricing was, but I have 100GB of server space with unlimited bandwidth costing me around $10 US per month. Of course I also have domain registration charges in the region of $10 per year, per domain as well, but it's a relatively small price to pay just for email address continuity alone.

Putting aside a chunk of space for picture hosting won't hurt me and I'll just use one of my existing domains rather than register a new one as domain name for purely hosting is irrelevant. Hacking is virtually a non-issue with a small domain as well - they don't come up on hackers' radar and even if they somehow do, it's relatively trivial to pull the entire site down and upload a fresh copy.

I'm not against entities making money, it's what keeps the world turning after all, but for a company like photobucket to suddenly and without warning, modify it's core functions from free/cheap to $400 per year seems unscrupulous. It seems they figure there's enough people dependent on them now, and for most (like Brian and his 8000 forum pics for example) it's virtually impossible for them to switch services and maintain their existing content. I'm hugely speculating here, but I'm thinking it's a quick money grab, followed by a quick sale of the entire business while the figures look good, and ending with photobucket becoming largely irrelevant within a year or two.

I agree that normal users should never erase original content because they've uploaded to an external host. I use 3 point retention - my PC's hard disk, an external hard drive permanently hooked up to my PC for quick access (very important or I never get around to backing up) and external hosting (like youtube, photobucket, cloud, etc. and soon to be my own server). The two hard disks guard against physical hardware failure and nasty malware attacks, while the external hosting guards against fire, theft, etc.

 

[bazmak]

I only put photos up that i want to show on a host site.I will just have to be more descriptive in future. Nuf said

 

[crankshafter]

Hello all.
So PB is on its way to the scrappy?

How about start using Tapatalk?

CS

 

[deverett]

I see Neils Abilgaard uses Imgur. Perhaps he would like to comment on its use.
I've had a quick look through the Terms and Conditions and considering the usage is 'free', with all the usual advertising, I can't see anything onerous in them.

Dave
The Emerald Isle

 

[Blogwitch]

If you already have a subscription, even the cheapest one, like I have, I have just read in their terms and conditions that they have given us a bit of breathing space so we can find somewhere else to host our pictures..

If you were a Plus Account subscriber in good standing as of June 1, 2017,
you will continue to have all the privileges you have enjoyed including 3rd
Party Hosting until December 31, 2018 as long as you maintain your
subscription.

But remember, after that time, your piccies will disappear from this website


I hope this helps.

John

 

[deeferdog]

This is from Wiki "As of June 30, 2017, Photobucket requires a $99 annual subscription to allow external linking to hosted images and a $399 annual subscription to allow the embedding of images on third-party websites, such as personal blogs and forums. This policy change, enacted with no advance warning, has been highly controversial."

 

[Jasonb]

Thanks for digging that out John. I had a feeling they were hitting the free users first as my photos are still all fine.

Gives me a chance to decide what to do at a relaxed pace rather than be forced into a rush decision. Who knows by 1st jan 2019 they may have restructured their costings

 

[abby]

Sounds very much like the death knell to forums that need pictures , I think the other free hosting servers will follow Photobucket's lead eventually.
I cannot see many people being willing to pay $40 per month for the privilege of entertaining the non-contributers to this and similar forums.
It may be that the forum owners , who incidentally charge for premium membership and make money from advertising , will cover the costs for their biggest contributers ( tongue in cheek).
Of-course this doesn't prevent the attachment of pictures to posts but most forums don't have enough space , and it is not the most convenient method.
Dan.

 

[TonyM]

I imagine that if forums like this have limited space then they could limit the size of attached pics because for general on screen viewing the quality does not have to be that great.

 

[Blogwitch]

The main advantage of using an offsite hoster is that you can put your images anywhere within your post, whereas with onsite hosting you are usually limited to a line of pictures with no text to describe what you are doing. Plus, if everyone started to upload pictures to the site, it would soon become bloated and start to get unwieldy and slow.

I know I can now continue using PB for another 18 Months without losing any of my posted pictures until then, giving time for me to find somewhere else to host, but after that time, most, if not all pictures will have disappeared from every post on here that relied on PB.

This is a major problem with this site, you cannot go back and edit your old posts to put the pictures back if you do find somewhere else to host them, and unless that issue gets addressed quickly, this site will be an empty shell with plenty of words, but little or no pictures within the next year or so, with no way for us to resurrect it.

Survival rests with admin allowing us access and us 'fixing things' in our old posts.

Has anyone got a better solution to this disaster?


John

 

[RonGinger]

I have always been troubled by a forum that encourages, or requires, photos to be posted off the forum site. A forum is useless without photos, they are as much, or more use as the text. We now have a forum here that is mostly useless. All of the great build logs are just trash.

Sure, photos take space, but it should be part of the cost of running the forum. To late to go back now, this forum and others might as well delete all their past threads. It is a damn shame that forum owners tried to take the cheap way out and have now lost most of their content.

 

[Jasonb]

Ron

I said it before all the images can still be viewed, it is just a pain to do so so why delete all the threads when it is still possible for someone who really wants to follow a thread eg if they are making the same engine to see the images. And you don't need to be a computer wizz to find the album that a set of photos are in so even easier than right clicking each blanked out image.

Same applies to threads by people like bogs and myself our threads are still showing all the images so deleting them now would be stupid.

John

I think the only way old threads could be updated without teh ability to go back and edit would be for the author to go back and copy their text and paste it into a new thread or document and add the newly rehosted images. Might even be an easier option than trying to edit numerous posts. Maybe produce it as a single PDF which would keep teh size down and host teh pdf somewhere free liek dropbox (well until they start charging for it)

 

[ShopShoe]

So the first time I heard of this I checked and my photos were still working. Yesterday I got two emails from Photobucket that only provided a "Upgrade Now" option without the pricing being provided. This type of "pig-in-a-poke" sales technique never makes me happy and I am less likely to trust them now.

Where I am in life right now I hardly have any time in the shop and the last thing I want to do is spend time fixing this issue.

This whole thing is a hobby for me and $400.00 would buy some nice tooling or a few years of that would get me a new lathe.

I will be making a decision, but for now I am not putting in all-nighters (as we used to say) to fix my old posts.

For the time being, I will be following others and trying to write detailed descriptions in new posts.

I may follow those who only post videos using YouTube and link to those, but I prefer the text-and-photos medium for viewing and guess others do too. Of course, I might have to upgrade my video equipment for that and more money would go there.

You may also find me on "the other" forum, where some options are being discussed as well.

(Stop Here or go on for philosophy)

What I think may be involved here, beyond greed, is that there is a possibility that so many new cloud options are developing that Photobucket's original business is going down at the same time they are trying to compete with some of the other services out there and wanting to add features for that market ( which seems to be borne out by their frequent emails telling me I can order things from them or do such and such with my photos.) I also think they are losing market to those who now share photos directly from their smartphones instead of using web hosting.

Whatever the reason, I feel they could have provided some other options.

--ShopShoe

 

[Blogwitch]

Jason,

Over the last few months, while trying to get my shop resurrected I have been trying to do just that.

I thought of bringing back to life my Scott flamelicker thread which I was half way through when my mind got played with. That is a very long post, and I managed to get what was there completed, and I was starting to put in my PB piccies into the text, but now it is useless if the post will only be valid for 18 months.

I have over 6,000 pictures that I need to host (2.5K of them not on PB but stored on my computer) so that I can carry on the way I used to, a bit of text explaining the following picture.

My surface grinder is almost there, just the DRO to fit (and finish off the post about it) and then my lathe will be converted to VFD control as soon as a couple of bits get in from China, namely a wire wound pot and scale knob. That was another post that would have shown how to connect all the controls of the VFD to your standard buttons and levers on your lathe rather than having to to use a pendant with limited functionality.
So say 2 months max and I will be ready to start posting again in anger, (I have enough just tooling projects to keep going for two or three years and double that time for engine builds, if I last that long) but won't be doing anything until this issue of picture hosting can be sorted.


John

 

[Lakc]

From a Photobucket TOS it may be possible to just link rather than embed the images? Posts wont be as pretty but the information will still be there.

 

[TonyM]

I guess some people have an even bigger problem. http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/interne...ing-your-amazon-ebay-listings-pricier-n779781

 

[bazmak]

Just trying out image shack as per Brians suggestionhttps://imageshack.com/i/pm7Bhttp://imageshack.com/a/img922/7930/7B4Bzv.jpg4Bzvj
How do paste the image rather than the link. Please Brian

 

[Cogsy]

Baz - when you're typing a post, look at the menu above where you're typing. See the button that looks like a picture of a mountain - click that and a little window will open. Paste the address of your image in that box and it *should* insert the image. I tried it with the address you posted but it's not the right one. Your need the link that is titled something like 'direct' or 'embed'.

As I posted in Brian's thread, Imageshack has previously done pretty much exactly what Photobucket has now done and I wouldn't trust them not to do it again. I'll be looking elsewhere myself.