I'm not sure if it will work for everyone, but Photobucket Embed Fix is a Firefox/Chrome addon that automatically replaces all the old Photobucket links with the original photos.
Photobucket Image Hosting
- Thread starter Vuldacon
- Start date
Photobucket just sent me an email that they let me keep my Plus 20 account for a few months as a "convenience" but unless I fork over more $$ within 30 days they're suspending my paid account and it goes back to the free one that doesn't allow hosting.
So I've either got 30 days to deal with getting everything off there and finding another image host that allows third-party hosting or paying that damn $399 that I really can't afford. One of my forums hasn't had a banner since this happened; the owner doesn't want to pay for hosting, and I can't really blame him because he only has two forums and the other hasn't been used in years. So I told him I'd host the banner myself, not guessing Photobucket would renege on their word to grandfather my account for the full 12 months.
I politely told them off, and now I guess it's time to buckle down and find a new hosting company.
So I've either got 30 days to deal with getting everything off there and finding another image host that allows third-party hosting or paying that damn $399 that I really can't afford. One of my forums hasn't had a banner since this happened; the owner doesn't want to pay for hosting, and I can't really blame him because he only has two forums and the other hasn't been used in years. So I told him I'd host the banner myself, not guessing Photobucket would renege on their word to grandfather my account for the full 12 months.
I politely told them off, and now I guess it's time to buckle down and find a new hosting company.
Posting them in regular posts isn't the problem. I'm an admin on several forums, and I need a place that can host banners, icons, backgrounds - the visual parts of the css that makes a forum skin unique, like CFC's banner and background and the staff badges. And I need it to allow private albums, since one of the smiley artists whose images I use as icons gets extremely irate if anyone makes a public album of her work. Right now the gaming forum where I'm a co-admin but not the owner has that obscene "500" image in place of our banner because the banner was hosted on the owner's account and he's opted not to upgrade. I said I'd do it because I thought I had until next year to find a new host. Turns out I have less than a month.
Valka D'Ur... That is a different situation
I thought you meant just posting images here. Good Luck with your situation.
Thanks.
At any rate, I've spent part of the evening deleting a bunch of stuff I really don't need anymore.
Now I need to figure out how to save photos on a Windows 10 computer so I can actually save the stuff I want from my Photobucket account and put them elsewhere.
At any rate, I've spent part of the evening deleting a bunch of stuff I really don't need anymore.
Now I need to figure out how to save photos on a Windows 10 computer so I can actually save the stuff I want from my Photobucket account and put them elsewhere.
6K Man
Bureaucrat
Possibly a dumb question, but what’s to stop me from opening a tumblr account, uploading all my images there, and then linking/embedding them here or wherever?
Check their Terms of Use to see if they allow that. If so, great. If not, you can't.
Right after this whole Photobucket thing was announced, a lot of people just downloaded their entire albums and left. So they disabled that feature. You can only download the photos one at a time now.
I'm just going through it to see what I absolutely don't need anymore, what I can find later online and snag it again, and what I absolutely do have to save (my Doctor Who forum will become a jumbled mess, for example, if I don't get this stuff hosted elsewhere since absolutely every image that's part of our customized css is on my Photobucket account (other than the current banner, that's hosted by the forum owner).
6K Man
Bureaucrat
Tumblr, as far as I can tell, is largely made up of pornography... so I can't imagine that their TOS is particularly stringent. Still, I'll check.
Synobun
Deity
- Joined
- Nov 19, 2006
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- 24,884
Tumblr will do the same thing Imgur does and disable hotlinking for any images that take up an unusual amount of bandwidth. For sharing casual images that will rarely be an issue but using Tumblr as a CDN (such as the example of theme images on a forum) will probably get the images blanked out fairly quickly if there's a lot of traffic.
6K Man
Bureaucrat
Ahh OK. I've been using Imgur for a while and that hasn't been an issue for me, so far. Good to know.
I'll suggest this to the owner of the gaming forum I co-admin. If he didn't nuke his account, we might get our banner back.
Update: Telling them off worked. I got this email from them today:
So I emailed back to thank him politely. Looks like I'm okay until June 1, 2019, since if I still have anything in that account (I'm going to continue to move stuff to a new host) I'll keep it around long enough to make sure my forums don't suffer any more than they have already.
I was flabbergasted with the first email they sent, demanding I upgrade within 30 days or go back to free hosting. I told them I already paid to renew my subscription on June 2, and why were they intending to charge me twice for the same 7 months? So someone must have had an attack of math, or understood what I told them about my having renewed expecting to be dealt with in good faith, and they weren't doing that.
This is a relief, since there's something else going on that's equally worrying. InvisionFree is shutting down, and the IF forums are being migrated either to ZetaBoards or to some other thing that frankly looks like a nightmare. ZetaBoards is bad enough, since it's nowhere near as intuitive as IF.
Given the choice, however, I'd take ZetaBoards, since I've already worked with it and was part of the original beta-testing team many years ago (although they obviously didn't take some of my recommendations to heart). I really don't have the mental stamina right now to start over from scratch with something else that I've never worked with. I'm in contact with an old acquaintance from the smiley artist forum I belonged to many years ago, and she currently runs a Zetaboards support forum as well as being on staff at the official forum. So that's someone to get some help and advice from as well.
So I've still got a ton of stuff to save on the Doctor Who forum and a couple of test forums I'd set up to experiment with skinning. The gaming forums aren't owned by me, but I'm going to make strong recommendations to the owners (they don't do much about the tech end of things; that's my job).
Synobun
Deity
- Joined
- Nov 19, 2006
- Messages
- 24,884
Jcink runs off the same back-end as Invisionfree and is still kept up to date. Also has better support and more control over appearance.
I believe the admin for Jcink also helps transfer any databases you may have from IF as well so you don't lose posts or have to do manual transferring.
I have a Jcink forum that's in development. It's exactly the same as IF as regards tinkering with the css, but the catch is that if it's not accessed at least once every 30 days, the forum is deleted. They even keep track of how often I access the Admin panel and have sent emails chastising me when it's not often enough.
I'll keep this in mind, since the gaming forum doesn't need everything ZetaBoards offers (media embedding, blogs, etc.). The Doctor Who one could benefit from that, but ZetaBoards is such an ungodly pain to use as far as skinning goes, I'd rather Jcink be used.
Unfortunately, though, I'm not the owner of either site, so the final decision isn't mine. They tell me that I can modify the forum as I see fit, since that's something I enjoy and while they like the visual results, they find it a headache to work with (some people do, so I don't blame them for that).
Valka D'Ur... Congratulations on at least being granted extra time.
Personally, I believe this "Raise in Pay Move" from Photobucket is outrageous! They could have at least offered several less expensive positions.
Times are changing again, so brace yourself for the Brave New World of Money in Cyberspace!
Personally, I believe this "Raise in Pay Move" from Photobucket is outrageous! They could have at least offered several less expensive positions.
Times are changing again, so brace yourself for the Brave New World of Money in Cyberspace!
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2007
- Messages
- 9,305
So I received an e-mail from Photobucket a few hours ago:
It appears they realized $400 was ridiculous if you were only using it for recreational use on forums or so forth, and $120 is a lot lower. This is the link if that sounds more reasonable. Interestingly, it shows up as Plus100-yearly in the cart, for $120, whereas their pricing page lists Plus 100 for $100/year. The difference seems to be the one from the e-mail says it will include 3rd-party-hosting, whereas the regular one does not (only the aforementioned $400 plan does). I suppose that's the extra $20, although it does make me wonder if it looking like the same plan might lead to problems like what Valka D'Ur experienced in the future. Still, if it does renew indefinitely and allow 3rd-party hosting, it's definitely a better option than $400 provided you don't need more than 100 GB of storage.
The link takes me to the sign-in page, so I think it will work for people in general. Not sure though. And I've already started migrating my images to my e-mail provider whom I like better and who charges less, so I plan to continue that. Even though from a purely rational perspective, at $120 it probably is a more efficient use of my time to go with that rather than re-upload, whereas at $400 it wasn't. Kind of a matter of principle, too. If they'd, say, given three months notice, offered the $120 option up front, and allowed even a small free limit for those who were really light users (say, 100 MB/month) - and ideally, offered some midrange tiers as well, like Vuldacon mentioned - I may have signed up from the start. I did have the old $36 tier a couple times when I was most active in Stories and Tales, because the convenience was worth that price. But after the $400 money grab and thousands of images disappearing for months already, I'm not very inclined to support them.
It appears they realized $400 was ridiculous if you were only using it for recreational use on forums or so forth, and $120 is a lot lower. This is the link if that sounds more reasonable. Interestingly, it shows up as Plus100-yearly in the cart, for $120, whereas their pricing page lists Plus 100 for $100/year. The difference seems to be the one from the e-mail says it will include 3rd-party-hosting, whereas the regular one does not (only the aforementioned $400 plan does). I suppose that's the extra $20, although it does make me wonder if it looking like the same plan might lead to problems like what Valka D'Ur experienced in the future. Still, if it does renew indefinitely and allow 3rd-party hosting, it's definitely a better option than $400 provided you don't need more than 100 GB of storage.
The link takes me to the sign-in page, so I think it will work for people in general. Not sure though. And I've already started migrating my images to my e-mail provider whom I like better and who charges less, so I plan to continue that. Even though from a purely rational perspective, at $120 it probably is a more efficient use of my time to go with that rather than re-upload, whereas at $400 it wasn't. Kind of a matter of principle, too. If they'd, say, given three months notice, offered the $120 option up front, and allowed even a small free limit for those who were really light users (say, 100 MB/month) - and ideally, offered some midrange tiers as well, like Vuldacon mentioned - I may have signed up from the start. I did have the old $36 tier a couple times when I was most active in Stories and Tales, because the convenience was worth that price. But after the $400 money grab and thousands of images disappearing for months already, I'm not very inclined to support them.
I wonder if they're going to try to renege on my account being granted an exception.
As far as I'm concerned, Photobucket can go to hell. I was investigating other options, and then remembered that I have a Fotki account (hasn't been used in years, but it should still be there). They have a nice big announcement on their site that they welcome ex-Photobucket members and they do have albums and third-party hosting. They provide free accounts, and also various tiers of paid accounts, depending on what people want to use their account for (ie. non-commercial vs. commercial use; they allow professional photographers to sell their pictures).
As far as I'm concerned, Photobucket can go to hell. I was investigating other options, and then remembered that I have a Fotki account (hasn't been used in years, but it should still be there). They have a nice big announcement on their site that they welcome ex-Photobucket members and they do have albums and third-party hosting. They provide free accounts, and also various tiers of paid accounts, depending on what people want to use their account for (ie. non-commercial vs. commercial use; they allow professional photographers to sell their pictures).
I've checked my emails and have not received any notices about this latest offer. I'm guessing it was only sent to people whose paid accounts lapsed, or who never had a paid account?
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2007
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- 9,305
It may well have only been sent to those who had a lapsed paid account.
I'd never heard of Fotki, but their prices seem quite reasonable (link). Although I don't know if your old account will be there. According to Wikipedia, they deleted all free accounts in late 2015. Which probably also caused an uproar, but they offer a year for $17 (which specifically supports hotlinking from forums) instead of $400 like Photobucket. All said, I can see the appeal in a reasonably-priced, ad-free, probably-still-going-to-be-there-tomorrow-due-to-the-business-model hosting site like that.
I'd never heard of Fotki, but their prices seem quite reasonable (link). Although I don't know if your old account will be there. According to Wikipedia, they deleted all free accounts in late 2015. Which probably also caused an uproar, but they offer a year for $17 (which specifically supports hotlinking from forums) instead of $400 like Photobucket. All said, I can see the appeal in a reasonably-priced, ad-free, probably-still-going-to-be-there-tomorrow-due-to-the-business-model hosting site like that.
