Thread: Photobucket users held to ransom

For those looking for an alternative I'd recommend Google Photos or imgur if you're just looking to upload a photo and link it somewhere quickly. I mainly use imgur for linked photos but keep everything backed up on Google photos as well.

Perhaps vBulletin have an automatic server side plugin to download all PB-hosted images off PB and keep them locally.

I seem to remember writing about this quite some time ago.

Should do this for all offsite images, not just PB.

Strikes me as a pretty simple thing to do as a script if I had access to the database. Lookup, slurp, shove in /images, then change the link in the DB.

PHP would take no time at all.

I have moved my photos to Postimage.org

This is an excellent, and free site. It permits direct linking. It also up- and downloads speedily.

I do not understand Photobucket's mentality. The problem for users such as myself, Photobucket (and postimage.org) are the only sites that offers a facility to create categories and links.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Photobucket appears to be blocking the most frequent users first. Less than $100/year would have them rolling in money. I won't give them a dime.
There's a smell that Imgur might do the same.

The change to PB's Terms of Service was on June 27. Since then, it appears that Post Image is the place to be.

I don't understand why people don't just post from their own computers

Originally Posted by Sawdust Maker

I don't understand why people don't just post from their own computers

Me neither...

Originally Posted by Sawdust Maker

I don't understand why people don't just post from their own computers

A few possible reasons I can think of:
1) People want to post the images to multiple places, so this way they only need to upload them once.
2) People who post them to their own blog, by having them on a free server it doesn't count against their own bandwidth or storage quotas.

I guess photobucket really are shooting themselves here, but may succeed in getting enough people to sign up due to the pain and horror of having to rehost everything. Still, for $400 US / year, I could set up a pretty decent image server with enough space for thousands of photos, but I'm a computer guy so I have a higher tolerance for computerised silliness.

As an aside, I noticed from the first post in the "Related Posts" section that repliconics used photobucket, and there seem to be about 300-400 photos of his on photobucket there that may get lost without some intervention. A quick test suggests it should be possible to grab the photos he linked to there, given the list of URLs. But I would feel presumptuous to do anything without some kind of consensus and/or Neil's approval, particularly as I'm not the owner of the photos and nothing more than an appreciative viewer.

Replacing the forums may be a bit of a pain.

Iain

Originally Posted by Sawdust Maker

I don't understand why people don't just post from their own computers

So I can post in multiple places.

The forum software here went ape & removed a stack of photos.

Posting from home computers has been a gateway for hacking.
Most of you have no reason to be interested in Woodcarving Illustrated or their Wood carving website forums.
It was the world's biggest encyclopedia of carvings and techniques. Thousands of illustrations.

Post hack, the texts could be saved but not a single illustration. I'd hate to see that happen here.
Hence, Photobucket, Imgur, Flickr and others were the acceptable sources of illustrations.
You do anything to your source images and they all disappear from these forums.

Photobucket hums along as usual. They have changed the Terms of Service to make it cost-prohibitive for many of us.
Concensus is that if you are willing to move then Post Image is the place to go.

I've had a Domain name and web site address for over 20 years, moved it many times as one Hosting service went down or jacked up prices, takes all of 10 minutes to shift and no loss of service (well minimal in some cases) and of course I have a mirrored site backup on disk. Cost me around $50 a year and I have tons of space for all those years of posting pictures and future pictures, along with a couple of web sites. I know it doesn't suite some but it's been very handy for me in many ways.

Back to the topic, I can't see them surviving if this is the case, I've lost count of the pictures on forum web sites all over the world that link to pictures on Photobucket.

Most issues to do with bandwidth or quotas relating to images are because folks are simply to lazy to resize and tidy up their images to suit web presentation.
What's the point of storing a 20Mb picture on line? - the number of times that images of this res need to be on line must be <1%.

If the images are resized to <801x 801 pixels and optimised for web use they take up stuff all space so that uploads are fast and quotas are unaffected.

Currently my 2318 images on the forum consume 187.49 MB or an average of 81 k.
I estimate that before the last forum image loss I had about the same amount and I seem to remember that in 2011 my images average 76 kb.
About 1/2 those images are posted elsewhere and I have no problems uploading or with quotas.

Can appreciate if you are on the end of a string and can connection you might have these issues but then you'd think folks would be even more judicious about processing their images accordingly.

Originally Posted by nyamo_iaint

As an aside, I noticed from the first post in the "Related Posts" section that repliconics used photobucket, and there seem to be about 300-400 photos of his on photobucket there that may get lost without some intervention. A quick test suggests it should be possible to grab the photos he linked to there, given the list of URLs. But I would feel presumptuous to do anything without some kind of consensus and/or Neil's approval, particularly as I'm not the owner of the photos and nothing more than an appreciative viewer.

Replacing the forums may be a bit of a pain.

Iain

One of my greatest fears from the moment he passed was what would happen to jis pics on photobucket.

I for one would be most happy if someone was able to save them and I have no doubt that Trevor would jave neen happy for that to have happened

DaveTTC
The Turning Cowboy
Turning Wood Into Art

My webserver resizes and compresses the photos I upload for me instantly. Although I upload large files strictly due to laziness, others may have no idea how to resize and compress, or even the fact that a raw 20 megapixel photo straight from their camera is a huge file size.

Originally Posted by DaveTTC

One of my greatest fears from the moment he passed was what would happen to jis pics on photobucket.

I for one would be most happy if someone was able to save them and I have no doubt that Trevor would jave neen happy for that to have happened

DaveTTC
The Turning Cowboy
Turning Wood Into Art

I have checked the Brough and Indian build threads and all photos in those have been uploaded to the forum and all seem to be still there.

Which threads did he use Photobucket uploads in?

Edit:

I have checked nearly all his threads back to when he joined in 2013 and haven't been able to find any photos linked to Photobucket.