Photobucket commits business suicide

Xavier Bacon

Xavier Bacon

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From another forum:

http://www.chaos-dwarfs.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=17056&pid=277560#pid277560

Photobucket is disallowing linking on forums, and even worse, holding your images to ransom (cannot view or download) unless you pay to upgrade. They want $400 a year for the privilege!!!

Anyone badly affected by this? I've got 99% of my photos elsewhere, so when this issue hit my thread on Dakka Dakka I deleted my Photobucket account. Screw them.
 
Well I will admit that I have used Photobucket for all my postings here. Had to dig all the way back to page 12 of the Miniatures and Terrain section to find my plog (anti-progress log seems more accurate... but I have excuses I comfort my ego with :rolleyes::(), but was somewhat relieved to find the pics were still there. Is Imgur still the go to these days? Getting a few more life things sorted should let me get back in the brush and glue side of the hobby game soon enough, maybe a new pic sharing site will help me try and turn that plog into a progress log :whistle:
 
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The price is a tad crazy. Offer a decent amount of storage but not crazy high with a reasonable monthly and you'll have people converting. But $40/month? Insane.
 
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i just download straight to yaktribe. (And last night figured out how to link to my gallery.) I have stuff on photobucket, but haven't actually used any of it since MySpace was a thing.

@Malo : are all these photos too much of a drain on site resources?
 
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Xavier Bacon said:
Anyone badly affected by this?
Click to expand...

This is completely fubared. Nothing like a bit of commercial ransomware. Pretty much all of my pics are on PB for all of the forums I post stuff on (multiple gaming and other hobby forums). Have downloaded all of my albums from Photobucket, so I will be able to reconstruct the pics in the forums, but its going to take a lot of wasted time.

If you expect to be affected by this, download your albums NOW!
 
I don't see need to download albums - from what I gathered, your pictures will still be there, you just can't link to them on forums any more. In any case, I expect I still have the pictures, as I don't routinely delete them on uploading them elsewhere. It's just a question of whether or not I find and amend any affected posts.
 
I'm kinda glad. PhotoBucket was a good resource back in '06 but these days it's just naff and seems to go out of its way to barely work. I use Flickr for long term private storage, Imgur for immediate sharing, and Dropbox for stuff in between (running on my phone and computer so new photos appear immediately everywhere).
 
Ben_S said:
I don't see need to download albums - from what I gathered, your pictures will still be there, you just can't link to them on forums any more. In any case, I expect I still have the pictures, as I don't routinely delete them on uploading them elsewhere. It's just a question of whether or not I find and amend any affected posts.
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My primary purpose for using PB is as a host for the pics I post in quite a few online forums. I've been paying $30 a year to be able to do that. Bumping that cost to $400 a year for the same capability I have now is completely unreasonable. In addition, when my yearly sub ends, my pics will be inaccessable until I resubscribe at a minimum of $60 per year. I'm downloading my pics now so I can move them to imgur before my sub ends.
Without the 3rd party hosting ability, there is no reason for me to use PB at all.
 
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i don't think anything i had on PB was "mine" anyways. i think i did have some cool old anime wallpapers, tho...
 
Did they start already? Page 24 and 28 in the alternative gorkamorka minis thread have PB 3rd party hosting blocked photos (just started reading that thread)
 
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To anyone migrating from Photobucket to Imgur - obviously there is a risk that Imgur could do the same thing in the future, causing you to seek a third option and migrate once again.

You may be able buy your own web hosting for a comparable price and then be safe in the knowledge that you'll always have control over your images and whether you can hotlink them.
 
Fold said:
To anyone migrating from Photobucket to Imgur - obviously there is a risk that Imgur could do the same thing in the future, causing you to seek a third option and migrate once again.
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To be fair Imgur is #35 on the whole 'net by traffic. PhotoBucket doesn't even make the top 100.
 
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Photobucket was so ad-heavy, outdated and clunky anyway - it was an unreliable nightmare and now they've gleefully decided to dig their own grave. I use it for my progress pics here so I don't clog up the gallery with part finished models, but honestly it was barely worth the hassle even for that small task.

I'll just delete my images and wave them goodbye as they sink into obscurity. I'm sure I get free webspace with my broadband that I've never used - I can probably figure something out with that.
 
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Flamekebab said:
To be fair Imgur is #35 on the whole 'net by traffic. PhotoBucket doesn't even make the top 100.
Click to expand...

Not sure that really does anything to insure against this happening with Imgur in the future. They only get so high in traffic league tables by counting hotlinked "traffic", which is exactly why they may possibly decide to turn that functionality off in the future since it costs them without generating any ad impressions! I wouldn't risk it personally.
 
Fold said:
Not sure that really does anything to insure against this happening with Imgur in the future. They only get so high in traffic league tables by counting hotlinked "traffic", which is exactly why they may possibly decide to turn that functionality off in the future since it costs them without generating any ad impressions! I wouldn't risk it personally.
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I think we might be talking cross-purposes here. Long term storage of photos is a separate task, I would argue. Getting images hosted easily and in a format that allows hotlinking is Imgur's entire raison d'etre. They're extremely popular and good at what they do. It's not in their interest to rock the boat as the only way to go is down if they change things up too much. As a result they've remained pretty much the same since they opened eight years ago.

What they aren't is a second-string image hosting service that may well try something drastic in an attempt to grow. The amount of images I've lost to ImageShack, for example. Images I hosted on their servers are gone, images I hosted with Imgur are still up.

If archiving photos is a priority then a different kind of service is a better fit. Dropbox, Flickr, something like that. I keep my personal photos backed up in Google Photos, for example.
 
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Still going through old threads, but now they're all ruined by the stupid Photobucket icon. Curse you photobucket!!!
 
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