Photobucket Image Hosting

Vuldacon

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Anyone else have a problem with Photobucket hosting your images here and on other sites?

All of my images have been removed for all posts for most of the years I have been here.
This is due to a change of policy at Photobucket.

One must pay Photobucket $399.00 per year to have their images hosted here and on other sites now.

This is Extreme and essentially wipes out many years of my Images and Previews from all Threads and Catagories throughout this site.

I could try to replace them all without using Photobucket but that would require an absolutely Extreme amount of time to do. This reminds me of when Image Shack did the same thing.

...just asking if anyone else is experiencing the same problem with Photobucket.

IMPORTANT EDIT: There is a work around to fix previously posted images as well as how to Post New Images from Photobucket.

Balthasar and I discovered how to work around the URL problem but it was initially going to require going to Photobucket to get the correct address and going through a few procedures. Balthasar discovered the ~original suffix while searching Images at Photobucket that will allow the much faster Fix.

...See Posts 42 and 43 on Page 3.
 
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I appear to still have mine.

400$ is a lot of money though. Under plans I have 50 per year, and 100 per year. 400 per year is the third and last plan.
 
I know it seems like ransom, this is going to happen to everything on the cloud eventually. Don't they even give you a chance to retrieve them.

And yes, I remember image shack did the same thing a while back, I think they said upgrade to a premium service or lose everything.

I use postimage.org since then. No login with postimage.org, drawback is you can't easily find your past downloads (need link they provide you, to the image), positive is that they can't hold your images hostage by trying to monetize them.
 
Well, apparently you do not lose your images at Photobucket... you simply cannot post them on other sites unless you go for the 3 plan for $399.00

I assume if this has not affected those of you who use Photobucket, it will.
 
As far as I'm aware it's been this way for awhile. It depends on how much you have stored there. Under 2GB is still free with some limits on bandwith. The price you quoted is for a subscription of over 500GB of storage and no bandwith limitations for a year. I do believe it's reasonable to charge a fee for large amounts of storage, but that does seem a bit excessive. Do you really have that much stored there?!? I've used them for years and still only have about 0.4GB.

*Edit: I just read this under their promoted articles:
Moving forward, new and legacy free account users will NOT have third party
hosting available.
So it looks like this is a recent change and will probably affect everyone eventually. :cry:
As you said only the highest subscription service offers unlimited 3rd party hosting from now on. Might look into Imgur, Blogger, or GitHub.
 
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Yes, this is a recent change. You don't need to get the $400 plan but, well, let's be honest here... nobody is going to pay for hotlinking privileges unless they were already intent on supporting that platform.

The bad news here is that Imageshack is not an alternative and neither is Imgur. Imgur now has an algorithm that routinely searches for images that are being hotlinked excessively and is known to outright blacklist entire domains from having Imgur images displayed on them. Forum providers like Jcink are commonly banned but any destination that is expressing CDN-like behaviour would be met with the same fate. All the mod creators switching over to Imgur would likely entail CFC getting flagged eventually, meaning any use of Imgur would be negated site-wide for everyone. :(

Some alternatives that do allow hotlinking for users include Imgfly, Postimg, Imgbox, and Imgrpost.
 
I do not even have a GB used or anywhere near that... that does not matter.
well... "Brave New world" here just saying... it is here.
.../ and as far as had been here ... NO, Abrupt!!! no warning or anything said regarding this change.

I have lost ALL my images and that is not ethical for the amount I have compared to 100 GB or Unlimited .
 
I do not even have a GB used or anywhere near that... that does not matter.
It used to matter, is what I was saying. After reading their new terms I understand it's not the size that's at issue, but the 3rd party hosting.
NO, Abrupt!!! no warning or anything said regarding this change.
Apparently, they did update their terms. I did receive an email from PB last week that I deleted without reading. I have no doubt it was about the change; I kind of regret that now.
I have lost ALL my images and that is not ethical for the amount I have compared to 100 GB or Unlimited .
So you can't d/l your albums anymore at all?
 
Yes, this is a recent change. You don't need to get the $400 plan but, well, let's be honest here... nobody is going to pay for hotlinking privileges unless they were already intent on supporting that platform.

The bad news here is that Imageshack is not an alternative and neither is Imgur. Imgur now has an algorithm that routinely searches for images that are being hotlinked excessively and is known to outright blacklist entire domains from having Imgur images displayed on them. Forum providers like Jcink are commonly banned but any destination that is expressing CDN-like behaviour would be met with the same fate. All the mod creators switching over to Imgur would likely entail CFC getting flagged eventually, meaning any use of Imgur would be negated site-wide for everyone. :(

Some alternatives that do allow hotlinking for users include Imgfly, Postimg, Imgbox, and Imgrpost.
My understanding is that if you had a Plus account that was in good standing on June 1, you get to keep the 3rd party hosting until December 31, 2018 (provided you don't lapse on your payments). After that you have to pay the extortion money they're demanding. You won't lose your images, they just won't let you post them anywhere. And if you haven't paid for the "no ad experience" you'll be subjected to that sort of harassment as well. A couple of nights ago I got an obnoxious popup banner saying I could go ad-free for $2.49/month... well hello, Photobucket! I already paid $39.00 USD (which is over $50 CAD) already, for an ad-free experience!

And now they're not only pushing people to buy posters, mugs, pictures, etc., but they're also sending out emails for "PBDeals" which is basically a bizarre combo of Photobucket and Amazon. The "deals" they're advertising have nothing at all to do with art or photography.

In my case, I squeaked it by one day. My Plus subscription expired June 2, and as soon as I saw their reminder email I promptly renewed... or as soon as I could get past their obnoxious, user-extremely-unfriendly login process that involves a "sponsored ad" full of pictures of naked people (basically what I would describe as full frontal nudity of the sort we don't even allow in the Arts & Entertainment forum in the Colosseum section of CFC).

I'm looking for a new hosting site that will allow me to park images there that I use for backgrounds, icons, buttons, etc. for the forums I admin (a Doctor Who forum, two RPG forums, a couple in development - one is a Jcink forum I chose because it works like IPB and is very user-friendly from an admin pov; I may have to reconsider and go with something else - and a handful of SF/F wikis). Unfortunately, it looks like Imgur will not allow this. The people at TrekBBS (the Star Trek forum I belong to) like Imgur for the caption and avatar contests, but for the forum icons... I don't know what service they used before migrating to XenForo (they never replaced the unique icons they had from the vBulletin version of the forum).

I used to have an active Fotki account; I'll have to revisit that and see if it will do. What I've been doing is weeding out my Photobucket albums - downloading what I want to save and deleting the rest. It's going to be an absolute nightmare to redo the photos and graphics on the Doctor Who forum; I hope the owner knows about this and doesn't use Photobucket for her section of the site.

@Vincour, I'm surprised that nobody has started a thread for this in OT. I think it's something people need to be aware of there, given the two photo threads.
 
It used to matter, is what I was saying. After reading their new terms I understand it's not the size that's at issue, but the 3rd party hosting.
that is what I was saying from the beginning.

NOW it is the 3rd option for 399.00 that allows you to post images on any other site

Greed... simple
 
So you can't d/l your albums anymore at all?
It is Not a matter of losing my images. I have all on CDs and a 2 terribyte Hard drive. It is a matter of the thousands of links and time to replace all I have done.

I never needed Photobucket for storing my images... just to be able to place images on this or any other site.
 
that is what I was saying from the beginning.

NOW it is the 3rd option for 399.00 that allows you to post images on any other site

Greed... simple
I imagine they look at it and say, Hey, it's less than $2/day, it's cheap!

And that's if you pay for a year. Otherwise it's $39.99/month which would allow them to collect an extra $80 from people who can't afford to pay all at once.

Well, the Plus 20 tier is what I already paid $39.99 for... for a year, not a lousy month.

In the weeks before and after my renewal I kept getting emails from them that were pushing the Plus 50 and Plus 80 tiers, and I told them to stop it since I didn't need that much space (I only use 3% of my Plus 20 as it is... less, now that I've deleted some of it).

I guess not enough people signed up for those higher tiers, or bought their mugs, posters, etc. (which someone over at another forum said was not a good experience; I take that to mean the quality of the product was less than adequate).

@Laurana Kanan: You can download your images. You're just not allowed to post them unless you fork over $$$. So if you have anything there you want to save, I recommend you download them before Photobucket changes its mind on that.
 
@Vincour, I'm surprised that nobody has started a thread for this in OT. I think it's something people need to be aware of there, given the two photo threads.

AFAIK, there's no real risk of CFC getting flagged by Imgur's algorithm as long as the hotlinking is kept casual like in photo threads or in one-off demonstrations. The issue comes when hundreds of people per day are loading the same images every single day. For example, if the index graphics here on CFC were hosted on Imgur instead of locally on CFC's server, it's likely CFC would get banned on Imgur because there would be several hundred to several thousand page loads a day (i.e. CFC is using Imgur as a CDN for its board images).

If mod creators switched en masse to Imgur, it would be a similar issue. Not a lot of page loads per individual image but there are thousands of mods on CFC. In the database you can get away with hosting images on CFC itself but I know in a lot of development and mod threads that the creators themselves like to host images off-site as it gives them greater flexibility.

While it's of course not a guarantee that CFC would get dinged through all of that, it's a situation where if CFC does get dinged it'd be to everyone's disadvantage (and we'd be right back where we started).
 
You're missing the point. Some of us use Photobucket for the images we post. Not that I ever post photos in the Members' Photos threads (might have posted one of my cat once, years ago), but I've posted others (most recently in the Canada Day thread).

It would be a shame if some of the Members' Photos or Cool Pictures photos got blocked and people were left wondering why. That's why I think we need a Photobucket thread in OT.
 
You're missing the point. Some of us use Photobucket for the images we post. Not that I ever post photos in the Members' Photos threads (might have posted one of my cat once, years ago), but I've posted others (most recently in the Canada Day thread).

It would be a shame if some of the Members' Photos or Cool Pictures photos got blocked and people were left wondering why. That's why I think we need a Photobucket thread in OT.

Oh. Sorry. I thought you were referring to Imgur since that's what the bulk of my post was about.

Most would probably figure it out themselves but we can post a temporary PSA. I'll check with my comrades in blue/red.
 
Do we have limits on how much stuff we can upload directly to CFC? For most of my stuff recently, I've been uploading directly to CFC rather than uploading them to photobucket/imageshack/imgur etc, since prior I was using imageshack before their policies kicked in.

I figure that small things like 5 images per thread on average is acceptable, because most threads in C&C don't have a whole ton of images, while unit or mod mega threads might have dozens of them per page, but do we have some sort of limit to uploads on here?
 
Do we have limits on how much stuff we can upload directly to CFC? For most of my stuff recently, I've been uploading directly to CFC rather than uploading them to photobucket/imageshack/imgur etc, since prior I was using imageshack before their policies kicked in.

I figure that small things like 5 images per thread on average is acceptable, because most threads in C&C don't have a whole ton of images, while unit or mod mega threads might have dozens of them per page, but do we have some sort of limit to uploads on here?

That is a very good question that deserves a very good answer.

And I don't know the answer to it. :blush: That might be a good question for Site Feedback since it seems no one else has asked this either.
 
And yes, I remember image shack did the same thing a while back, I think they said upgrade to a premium service or lose everything.
I use imageshack's "pro" service. $4 a month and never had a problem with limits on how much i post here at CFC. There is a size limit of 25 mb per file uploaded to imageshack's site, but CFC's limits on file size are much more severe. 1 TB bandwidth is plenty for my purposes as well. And the only images i've ever lost were during a crash/hack of their servers a few years ago.

The bad news here is that Imageshack is not an alternative ...
I've not noticed any problems. What have you experienced that makes it unacceptable?


.......


Do we have limits on how much stuff we can upload directly to CFC?
There is a "be reasonable" limitation - i don't think it's specifically stated because there is a wide variation in how much people need for various purposes, and what is considered reasonable could not be set to a specific universal standard.

From the "Full Rules" thread:
Images and file attachments
Currently we have the [img ] tag and the file attachment feature enabled. For files under 500 KB, you may use the attachment feature to attach the file. In addition, you can use Easy Upload to upload bigger files to the file server. You can help free up valuable forum server space and also improve forum performance by deleting any attachments you no longer need at the attachment management section of your User CP.

If you need to attach images often, we recommend using these easy to use free image hosting services:

EDIT
: based on my experiences as a moderator, people who tend to frequently post excessively large images are politely asked to reduce the size - regardless of where the image is stored. I'm aware of cases where formal warnings were issued - because of other member's complaints about related problems such as degradation of screen-loading speeds. I've never heard of anyone getting in trouble for using the direct upload feature, just asked to find alternatives.
 
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I've not noticed any problems. What have you experienced that makes it unacceptable?

The paywall, mostly. The quality of their servers has also taken a dive these past few years compared to other services and the Imageshack of yore.
 
Paywall I get - I was disappointed to have to pay $48 a year for what was previously free. As Pounder said "this is going to happen to everything on the cloud eventually." Which is why I own 4 external hard drives and more usb sticks than i can hold in one hand.

I'd like to hear more about what you mean by "quality of their servers". Specifics always help me understand why people make an absolute judgement rather than just stating their personal preferences..
 
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