Photobucket Apocalypse

[Kaitzilla]

It seems Photobucket wants $400 a year now to link pictures.
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/photobucket-image-hosting.619733/

I pay $40 a year for 20 gigabytes of which I use 5.
97% of it is Civ 4 screenshots I spam on these forums.
At least I'm ok until December 31st, 2018.
No way am I paying $400 just to be able to link civ 4 screenshots!

I can't imagine changing the links for every picture I've ever posted on these forums.
Maybe I'll keep the Civ Illustrated pics alive, but SGOTM and everything else might just end up as broken links.

Anyone have any ideas about this problem?

 

[Snowbird]

You can just use dropbox?
(on default link after ? replace whatever it does with 'raw=1')

 

[Imploding]

Thx for the tip Snowblind!

I was searching for something similiar. I needed a way to post all my replays to my channel!
I Just opened up google drive and "drag and drop" every replay there.

Seems to be no problem to share links or get a "pastable" link.

Got 15 gigabytes there on my gaming email account.. so I guess you easily can get something similar.
Unsure if it will help you Katzilla.. but it sure solved a thing i have been thinking about a couple weeks.

 

[lymond]

$400 dollars a year is redonkulous. Good luck with that Photosucket. I guess they think that they have folks who have used them for years by a noose with trillions of gigs of photos they don't want to lose.

I use Imgur for free, but not sure what they charge of extended storage. I don't need much. Imgur is nice an easy to use. (in fact, I just checked the site and could not find a pay service for Imgur..it appears to be unlimited..I've been using it since 2011.)

However, I think Kait may be asking not just about alternative services, but what to do to transition over his existing stored images on PB. I'm not sure. I figure there may be some way to mass download all the files and upload into Imgur or something. Might be a lot of work though, and certainly fixing broken links would be a nightmare, but you might gradually fix up some of the more important content over time.

 

[SittinDown]

I would guess that a mass photo-bucket export and a mass- (some other service) import would be fairly easy. if you did it right, you'd have a map manifest at the end that would give you the original link and the new link. the hard part would be going through posts here to migrate links to the new location. do the site admins here have any way of programatically doing a find-replace on your own posts?

 

[Kaitzilla]

Thanks for the replies everyone.

Since lots of people have likely paid Photobucket's $400 piracy already, I can't imagine them reversing their insane price increase. (x10 for me $_$)
http://www.denverpost.com/2017/07/16/photobucket-fee-hike/


I have 5300 pictures to move and 5300 image links on these forums to change, so only about 175 hours of work if I feel up to it.
I'll stop digging my hole deeper, and starting now all new pics will be from Dropbox or anyone else who charges around $100 a year or less.
Then do some triage over the next 16 months for forum links before the hammer falls.

Sigh, I would have paid $99 a year.
But not a PS4 every year.

 

[Pangaea]

(Not going to happen, too many people are stupid enough to pay the blood money, but)
I hope they are bankrupt this time next year.

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

tl;dr: GET OFF PHOTOBUCKET NOW.

Having snuck through multiple ToS changes without notification between the OP and now, Photobucket is killing off free accounts. Despite the big scary ransom screen when you log in, navigating back to your account page still works... for now. You can download the original files unadulterated (and they'll automatically pack up in a handy .zip file), so if you've lost your local sources, now's the time to update your backups.

Hotlinks are still up with the ugly watermark so you still have a visual guide for rehosting, but there's no timeframe given for when they plan to shut down accounts for good, so don't dally.

 

[Pangaea]

Hopefully Imgur doesn't turn to crap too. Photobucket did, and I stopped using them years ago. Became more of a pain than anything else, plus the factors you mention @Thorvald of Lym. Thanks for the warning. I probably still have the account somewhere, but wouldn't know how to log in any more. Maybe they already deleted it for all I know.

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

I probably still have the account somewhere, but wouldn't know how to log in any more. Maybe they already deleted it for all I know.

If the e-email you signed up with is still valid, you can recover your password. I hadn't used it since ~2012-2013 but as far as I can tell they haven't unilaterally nuked accounts yet.