I migrated all my PB pics over to Imgur and it was relatively painless. So far I am impressed with Imgur, way more usable than PB in its final death throes. I was expecting glitches galore but PB generated a zip file for download pretty quickly.
I managed to download one folder (watch photos) before attempting to delete the account. It's so slow (despite being on superfast broadband) to load anything it still took about 30 minutes just to download that one folder (after many attempts). After an hour or so of messing around I just can't be arsed trying to download the rest. For a tenner a year I would probably have paid for it but it's worth no more to me so no great loss. Plus it means that with all hope a load of my photos nicked and used round the world on other sites will also have disappeared!
"A man of little significance"
So are mine, although I did upload a few images that I never got around to posting.
They do know who is hotlinking images (3rd party hosting as they call it) and exactly which images. They can tell because the HTTP protocol includes a "referer header" (misspelling intentional). When you request an image from a server, the referer header tells it which page the request came from, so they know if people are linking to images from other sites. However, they probably ignore it unless it gets above a certain level. They could very easily block hotlinking for all images (and only when they are hotlinked), but clearly they intentionally opted not to do so.
Can you believe I've never done that, despite using Lr for years?! Even worse, I'll use various devices to hold the original image, so Lr can't cope if the wrong back-up isn't present. It's my innate dislike of post-processing I blame - nothing to do with stupidity or laziness of course...
R
Ignorance breeds Fear. Fear breeds Hatred. Hatred breeds Ignorance. Break the chain.
News had now hit the BBC with the words "ransom demand" being used repeatedly (in quotes, but also in the headline):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40492668
"The BBC received an automated response when it tried to contact the company and is still seeking comment."
Have you got a link for that?
The unfortunate thing about image hosting sites is that this is cyclical. There's always a new one starting up with a poorly thought out business model, meanwhile another one like PB is going bust. They are expensive to run and don't make a lot of money. Imgur is not much better. They took a lot of VC funding, so have been under a lot of pressure to start making money, hence all the social features. They have already disabled hotlinking for certain sites, they just haven't quite got to the PB stage of doing it for all sites yet. Their rather odd relationship with Reddit has largely broken down, as they've both realised they are actually competitors, not partners. So that is likely to get increasingly hostile and if they ever block hotlinking on Reddit, they will almost certainly block it everywhere else too.
There isn't really a good alternative, but postimage was looking like one of the better options. Only thing is I've noticed in the past couple of days they've started redirecting to "postimages.org" when their logo still says "postimage" (singular). That's not a good sign, and suggests they are already having issues with the influx of PB refugees if they are suddenly changing things like that, given they've supposedly been around, using the "postimage" name, since 2004.
Also the phrase "inspired by imgur terms of use" seems to have just been added to their T&Cs, as I don't recall seeing that last time I looked about a week ago. If they'd actually consulted a lawyer, that's the first thing they'd have told them to take out, so clearly they have not.
Thank you for your very interesting reply. I totally agree with you. Unfortunately I don't have a link for that, I have read it in a similar thread of another forum, I hope it is inaccurate. I should have asked for a link myself about this, though. This happened while I was in a middle of a thousand of other things at work, I was very angry about it and I didn't have the patience to search about that more thoroughly. Thank you.
As I am doing Amazon Web Services training at the moment I'll throw this in as an option for anyone with a bit of tech knowledge. Maybe use S3 to store the files. A lot of these photo sites probably use it under the covers anyway. Dropbox stores all their files on S3. The key is really how much you want to store and how often it would be accessed as that determines the pricing. You get a decent amount "free" with an account for a year but need to create new accounts each year to maintain some of the free parts.
I think the biggest issue might be an image becoming viral and the transfer costs going off the scale. But you can set limits to warn/lock down this. It's an interesting area at any rate and I imagine this sort of thing will become more prevalent as hosting sites find they have to charge more due to their own costs.As part of the AWS Free Usage Tier, you can get started with Amazon S3 for free. Upon sign-up, new AWS customers receive 5 GB of Amazon S3 storage in the Standard Storage class, 20,000 Get Requests, 2,000 Put Requests, and 15 GB of data transfer out each month for one year.
Last edited by reecie; 6th July 2017 at 12:48.
I'm very happy that I finally managed to find a way to make dropbox work.
Don't know if this is posted here before. I'm posting it just in case.
1. I uploaded a photo to dropbox.
2. Pressed share and created a shared link
3. Following instructions from here: https://milanaryal.com/hosting-image...-your-website/ , I replaced www.dropbox.com with dl.dropboxusercontent.com in the share link
4. added [img] at the beginning of the link and [/img] at the end of the link and copied and pasted the resulting text, to the forum reply field and the result is this, so it worked:
Hope this is useful to someone.
You will get a fright when Amazon send the bandwidth bill for an unexpectedly popular post. They are not cheap.
Pretty sure the free tier is only free for 12 months. Also, not sure what their overage policy is, but I believe you have pay for it rather than it being capped.
I mention most of that in my original post. People tend to create a new account under a new email to keep free. You set billing limits to address (or at least alert on the cost) though this is probably the the main issue with using AWS for this sort of thing outside of personal storage
The biggest problem with PB shutting down is losing images from forums that were posted years ago. If you can be bothered moving everything to a new account every year, you might as well use postimage or whatever site works right now, then switch again when it inevitably folds.
I'm not certain exactly how AWS does their billing these days (I've always avoided it). Maybe they've simplified it. But I have seen many horror stories about unexpected bills. It's pretty much the roaming-charges of the web.
A quick way to move everything onto your hard drive is via Google Chrome. Once you open it, go to their app store and download Photobucket Downloader (costs about £1.50), then open up Photobucket in Chrome, and there will be a download button on the right hand side of your photos. It will download 100 photos at a time. Takes a few seconds per 100. The whole thing just took me 20 minutes, including downloading chrome, signing into Google, buying the app and emptying Photobucket. Then deleting the fuxker!
I see photobucket has climbed down from their high horse and now offer a premium service for $100 a year. I had this email yesterday:
Dear Gary,
We would like to offer a tailored plan for users just like you - our Premium plan for $99.99 / year.The Premium plan will provide 3rd party hosting for non-commercial use on your forums, blogs, and personal websites*. Additionally, you will be able to store up to 300,000 photos.
I expect they were loosing revenue hand over fist and had to offer a more affordable option before all their customer migrated to other photo hosting services.
I'll probably stump up the cash purely for convenience and to keep some of my older threads running with pictures.
Cheers,
Gary
I just use the hotlink addon and all the old threads with photobucket work just fine. So I see no point in spending $99 a year when I can get a better service for $0 a year elsewhere.
After the damage they've done to numerous fora I hope they go to the wall the robbing b*******.
F.T.F.A.