I agree fully!
I have downloaded all my photos from their site, just in case I don't have a copy and put them in my Dropbox.
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There's a fair chance people may have already heard about this but the corporate idiots at Photobucket have WITHOUT WARNING, suddenly changed their policy & usage.
They are now asking $40 a month to use their services.
Big deal i hear the crowd saying, use an alternative service. Well it is a big deal as it means that all photobucket photos loaded onto this forum over the years are no longer viewable unless the user that originally uploaded the photo pays Photobuckets monthly ransom.
This means that we will be seeing a lot more photos on this forum archive that look like this
A damn shame in my eyes as there is no way all contributors from our glorious past are going to stand for the extortion tactics of evil Photobucket.
I have to admit it really cheeses me off as my entire history of contribution to this fine forum will be lost to corporate greed.
I will not swallow that level of ignorance or lack of consideration for a customer. I will be taking my photos elsewhere & i hope the masses do the same thing. Screw Photobucket i hope they lose every customer they ever had & go bankrupt !!
Steaming angry - Darren
I agree fully!
I have downloaded all my photos from their site, just in case I don't have a copy and put them in my Dropbox.
Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk
I got fed up with Photobucket some time ago. Mainly due to their site frequently appearing to be down.
Jumped across to imgur, which was a painless change.
Fingers crossed that all photo sites don't end up following Photobucket's lead
That's the reason for uploading them to Dropbox just in case others follow their business model.
I have 1tb that I pay for on Dropbox.
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Agreed, all a little short sighted if you ask me and a decision they might look back on with regret
I moved away from photobucket a while ago as I was fed up with the poor performance and constant errors when trying to upload. I've been using tinypic but that's going the same way. Annoying pop-ups that I can't stop and upload issues.
Looks like I will be trying imgur now. Thanks for the recommendation.
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It wasn't straight forward getting them, it was as if they were making it very difficult as the website kept freezing!
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I changed to imgur in the end because of the ads opening up on photobucket everytime I wanted to view something. I know they need to make money somehow but what an absolute PITA!
Just think of all the photos of loved ones who may have passed away, it's an absolute disgrace and I am sure will have caused a lot of distress, shame on you photobucket.
So most of Photobuckets customers who currently pay for the ad free service will now cancel out. The vast majority of the free service people will cancel or just abandon the site. Actual revenue will fall and advertising revenue will plummet as traffic is decimated.
Given that the people running the site can not be that stupid that they don't realise this, this must be a deliberate ploy to ensure early bankruptcy and subsequent protection from creditors.
There can be no explanation that relies on this move increasing revenue, that is impossible.
Mitch
I've just changed to imgur as well. Luckily I only ever put watch pictures on Photobucket, shame about the forum historic pictures though.
I've got many pics there and have them linked to various forums as a contributor.
The service has been increasingly frustrating to use and for me this is the last straw.
Is there an easy way to harvest all your pics from the site? Like others I have no idea if I actually have the originals of many of the pics, as they are only there to share with others.
Don't trust these 'cloud' providers , they can pull the plug anytime they wish.
I put my photos in many places but if they are important I always save them to at least two physical places. I don't t rely on other peoples computers.
Mitch
Flickr has a 1TB free tier and Google storage is cheap as chips - I struggle to understand how other image hosting sites exist
Shame on them! I'm really angry about their policy change and especially without a prior warning. They ruined years of discussions and photos in forums worldwide.
Any alternatives? I now use post image, but I read they are about to change their policy, too.
People here mention dropbox. Since I already use their service, it would practical to use that for the photos as well. How can you post an image to a forum (hotlink) from dropbox? Thank you in advance.
Also, imgur is proposed. Is it any good? Any other alternatives that probably will remain free, or will not ask 40$ / month for this? Thanks.
Last edited by markosgr28; 5th July 2017 at 06:27.
I post mostly from an iPhone. Tried Imgur and Flickr. Both services are great on desktop but on the iPhone apps Imgur only allows you to scroll through full size pics (no grid view) so that takes ages to find the right pic. Flickr has a grid view but does not show bbcode / IMG tags, only full links to a page (so you can't easily embed pics in a post). Happy to hear if I missed something.
I would be very surprised if Photo bucket have the legal right to exclude uploaded photos from their original authors.
Looks like they have breached their contract.
Legal advice please ?
www.webwatchmaker.com
I remember everyone used to use a site called imageshack.us, who did a similar thing. That did not go well for them.
I've been using imgur for years, but not entirely fussed - it's all free, after all.
I fully understand their shortsighted and lets be honest, kamikaze terms and conditions update, but this should only be applied to new uploads and not historical photos that were not part of this ludicrous change in policy.
I can only assume they are "scuttling the ship" so to speak from a financial / bankruptcy point of view. Is this is a revenue generating exercise, they have truly cocked up!
Just tried this from Dropbox as I was unsure how it would look.
This is a picture in my Dropbox account, if you follow the link do you only see this picture or can you navigate to see others?
I clicked the share link symbol and that created a hyperlink and then pasted that here.
It's the first time I have done it way so unsure what we will see.
Link removed as replys answered my question
Edit:
I have just answered that question, basically I can see the whole folder not just the one picture. Is it the same for everyone else?
I will remove the link once confirmed.
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Last edited by noidea; 5th July 2017 at 14:09. Reason: Link removed
Only the explorer shows.
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Did you try and scroll left and right? I am on my phone so it may be different and as it is my account maybe I will see them all?
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Last edited by noidea; 5th July 2017 at 10:01.
Guess imgur will go the same way when it gets flooded with people linking to third party sites.
I agree though, it's bad what PB have done. I've a lot of threads and guides on forums I've spent hours and hours doing, all ruined.
Same problems in the other forums where i'm a member. I trieds some other possibilities as google drive, icloud, imgur and found this nice and smart solution which is widely used by forums and bbs:
https://postimages.org/
no cost, no registration needed (only if you want to have albums and control over your content), no ads. Even the mobile versions works perfect.
imgur is the place to go now I understand from my tech savy mates....
Ive seen a few of these threads pop up but have used photobucket with no issues the same few days
Thank you for the reply ViperStripes (and not quoting the link)
I have now removed the link as my question has been answered.
Thanks again.
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PB ist still working for me via the app
Is the charge for hosting pics by forums or is general? I haven't received anything from them about charging but then again I saved down all my pics over a year ago to google and dropbox and my NAS. I also back up to my laptop on the rare occasion I dig it out. Regardless as a result I deleted my old account yesterday!
ive tried Flickr but really have trouble copying the BBc code on an ipad
oddly its still working for me via the app today as i expected it not to be after opening my mouth yesterday, its deleted a lot of historic resto thread pictures on the car forums which is removing a vast data base / reference library
Last edited by P ELLIS; 6th July 2017 at 08:44.
They haven't prevented anyone from accessing their own photos. What they have done is block access from 3rd party sites, as per their T&Cs. There's also no contract per se because it's a free service. There is only their TOS, which they are free to change whenever they want.
One exception is anyone that was previously paying for an account, but is now being forced to upgrade to their ridiculously priced 500GB package to re-enable hot-linking. That could be a breach of contract if and only if the original contract said hotlinking was allowed and they changed it without notice. But even then, since it's a monthly contract, they can still change the terms at the end of a month and don't need to give more notice than that, unless you paid up-front in advance for a longer term.
The only recourse is to close the account if you don't agree with the new TOS, which I would highly recommend doing as it's basically extortion (though not legally speaking, of course).
Having said that, for anyone who is moving their content elsewhere, it would be best if you don't actually delete the original images. Just leave them on the free account, with broken hotlinks. At least that way, if the images were originally posted with links back to full resolution on PB, those will remain accessible (albeit with a horrendous experience). The worst thing about this is that lots of historic threads, including ones where the pictures are actually informative (movement disassemblies etc.) have now been lost.
It would be better to go back and edit old threads, but that's not practical for the majority of them.
It does look a lot like the classic pump-n-dump scam. Get a handful of people to pay an exorbitant fee, 12-months up-front. Show an increase in revenue in the quarterly P&L. Tell investors "look, our monetisation programme is really successful, this projection shows we will be making 10x this next year!". Share prices go up, directors sell all their stock, investors realise that the quarerly P&Ls did not show how many users were jumping ship and so any projections based on an upturn in revenue were, at best, misleading. Share price falls, company goes bankrupt. Legal action ensues.
Thanks for that information.
It really irritates me how greedy these companies have become.
You can't access hardly any sites without reams of advertising.
Even my AOL email account now takes a good five minutes to function before I can write anything.
I now send photos to TZ directly from my phone and am relieved that I don't need photobucket any more.
webwatchmaker.com
Just downloading all my images now, I have them elsewhere but it's easier to stick them all in one file, PB are not making easy though to download, have tried downloading the entire bucket but that doesn't work so having to do individual libraries with some of them becoming non responsive..
Its a shambles..
I've left my account in place for the time being as a reference for what albums I have and what's in them. All of my pictures are on my hard drive and duplicated on two external drives for safety. Once I decide where to link from online and set it up I'll just delete the PB account.
F.T.F.A.
I too have everything on my hard drive. But I will leave my pb account in place, without adding more pictures. No reason for now for deleting them from my account. New pictures will be uploaded to dropbox that works for hotlinking photos to forum and I already use for cloud services along with other services.
I have seen a few threads recently with regards to the change in policy.Uploaded pictures just yesterday and uploaded them to the forum with no mention of policy change or any upload issues.
Maybe they are sending out the bad news in alphabetical order