Please don't use Photobucket

[jeffandnicole]

My images here are still dead, but something may be happening.  If you go to this page, http://www.photobucket.com/p500/ , they have 2 packages - a $99.99 'Premium' plan for personal use, and a $399.99 plan for Commercial use.  There's also a link in the upper right for other packages...which doesn't link you anywhere.  I don't think they had the $99 package previously.

However, if you go to their main page, they have a link at the top to create a new, free account, giving you 2GB of space.  I'm not trying it to see what it actually allows.  And I'm not unlocking my account for $99.

[hotdogPi]

My images here are still dead, but something may be happening.  If you go to this page, http://www.photobucket.com/p500/ , they have 2 packages - a $99.99 'Premium' plan for personal use, and a $399.99 plan for Commercial use.  There's also a link in the upper right for other packages...which doesn't link you anywhere.  I don't think they had the $99 package previously.

However, if you go to their main page, they have a link at the top to create a new, free account, giving you 2GB of space.  I'm not trying it to see what it actually allows.  And I'm not unlocking my account for $99.

That $99 plan was there before.

[1995hoo]

It looks like some of mine may be working again, although I certainly haven't paid them anything. I was going to try uploading a new image and embedding it here to see if it'd work, but the app crashed when I tried to log in. 

[Max Rockatansky]

Photobucket going rogue actually gave me the motivation to reedit all my photos and save them on storage devices.  I've been working on redoing a lot of the early stuff I did here as blog entries, I have only a couple weeks of 2017 left to finish.

[1995hoo]

OK, let's see whether this works. I logged in through their website and copied the IMG link for a photo I'd uploaded some years ago. If it works, you should get a photo of the space shuttle Discovery atop the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft over Arlington Cemetery.

[hotdogPi]

Yes. I'm seeing the photo.

[kkt]

Yay!

I am surprised so many people apparently don't care that all their old posts have no photos.  I know it's a huge pain in the butt to fix, but the post archives on here have a lot of great information.  I mean, we don't automatically expire the old posts, so someone must realize they have some value.

One other forum I read hosts images themselves so they can't get caught in this situation.  I wonder how much it actually costs them.  Terabytes drives are not that expensive anymore.

[gonealookin]

When Photobucket started displaying the error image instead of my photos, I salvaged what I thought was worthwhile, re-uploaded to Imgur and edited my posts here to insert the correct images.  That was laborious enough, and I only have 200 posts, fewer than 20% of which had images.  Someone with thousands of posts would have to set aside most of a weekend to fix all that.

After doing that I deleted my Photobucket account so everything not salvaged previously is gone forever.  In order to permanently eradicate the annoyance of the error image I did just go through the posts which remained which were showing the error image (about a dozen) and replaced the IMG embed with

(Edit:  Image posted on Photobucket deleted)

[ZLoth]

OK, let's see whether this works. I logged in through their website and copied the IMG link for a photo I'd uploaded some years ago. If it works, you should get a photo of the space shuttle Discovery atop the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft over Arlington Cemetery.

It works. 

Now, to find a img.bb clone which allows me to host my own images.

[Alps]

OK, let's see whether this works. I logged in through their website and copied the IMG link for a photo I'd uploaded some years ago. If it works, you should get a photo of the space shuttle Discovery atop the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft over Arlington Cemetery.

Weird, I'm seeing a photo of the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft on top of the Discovery.

[hotdogPi]

It just stopped working.

[jeffandnicole]

Great...now we have a whole bunch of 3rd Party Hosting Disabled Links.  This should be merged with the worst handicap parking spaces thread.

[1995hoo]

Heh, now this morning I'm seeing the error message. How bizarre.

[formulanone]

Perhaps that image just hit the bandwidth limit?

[Alps]

And this is why you should never use Photobucket. Thread over.

[1995hoo]

And this is why you should never use Photobucket anymore. Thread over.

They were fine for over ten years. Shame they went rogue with no warning. It's not the change in terms that bugs me so much as the way they did it by surprise.

[adventurernumber1]

And this is why you should never use Photobucket anymore. Thread over.

They were fine for over ten years. Shame they went rogue with no warning. It's not the change in terms that bugs me so much as the way they did it by surprise.

I never even used Photobucket, but it makes me really angry that the idiots running that thing actually did that - completely screwed you over, making millions of pictures defunct, including ones embedded in this forum. There's tons of those error pictures lying all over the place - what a mess. I don't understand why they had to be so greedy and abrupt all of a sudden.     

[seicer]

Because they were not making a profit. Their premium services were not generating enough revenue to cover the freeloaders. And who thinks that these "free" services are actually free? And why do people believe that these services need to be free and accessible to all for an indefinite period of time?

While I think it was harsh to make a sudden announcement that the freeloaders would have all of their images break - it's not out of the realm that other freemium services, like Imgur, will eventually follow suit.

[kkt]

Was there really no warning?  I thought there was at least a few weeks during which Photobucket dunned their users to cough up the dough.

[J N Winkler]

When I Googled, I didn't see any indication (at least in search result snippets) that there was any warning to users, with the possible exception of an email or series of emails that wound up in a billion spam folders.

Since third-party hosting offers no monetization opportunities for the provider, the prevalence of shareholder value maximization as a governing corporate philosophy meant that neither Photobucket nor any other image hosting service could credibly commit to providing free hosting indefinitely.  Gmail, Facebook, Flickr, etc. stay free largely because they are data mines and advertising pipelines (the latter at least for customers not savvy enough to use an ad-blocking HOSTS file).

[adventurernumber1]

Because they were not making a profit. Their premium services were not generating enough revenue to cover the freeloaders. And who thinks that these "free" services are actually free? And why do people believe that these services need to be free and accessible to all for an indefinite period of time?

While I think it was harsh to make a sudden announcement that the freeloaders would have all of their images break - it's not out of the realm that other freemium services, like Imgur, will eventually follow suit.

Even if they weren't making a profit, it is absolutely disgusting that they would abruptly not only introduce a mandatory price, but make it hundreds of dollars. What if someone living in poverty was using Photobucket? What a bunch of fools they were - they probably scared off almost every single user they had, and now they have probably gotten hardly any money at all. Idiots. 

Make the price $5, $10, $20, and the revenue will add up. But $300? $500? Horse manure.

[hotdogPi]

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/photobucket.com

[seicer]

Because they were not making a profit. Their premium services were not generating enough revenue to cover the freeloaders. And who thinks that these "free" services are actually free? And why do people believe that these services need to be free and accessible to all for an indefinite period of time?

While I think it was harsh to make a sudden announcement that the freeloaders would have all of their images break - it's not out of the realm that other freemium services, like Imgur, will eventually follow suit.

Even if they weren't making a profit, it is absolutely disgusting that they would abruptly not only introduce a mandatory price, but make it hundreds of dollars. What if someone living in poverty was using Photobucket? What a bunch of fools they were - they probably scared off almost every single user they had, and now they have probably gotten hardly any money at all. Idiots. 

Make the price $5, $10, $20, and the revenue will add up. But $300? $500? Horse manure.

If someone is in poverty, there are other free services they can migrate to. Some of these free services do not allow hotlinking, which Photobucket did - and that starves the site of much-needed advertising revenue. And like what has stated above, Google and others only allow these freebie services (when they aren't truly free), because they can monetize your data.

It's akin to people complaining about Facebook or Instagram and the advertisements they host. Can you imagine the uproar if they went to a premium model? Or if they had a model where you could pay to dance around the ads? People expect these services to be free when in reality, they are very expensive ventures.

In the world of the web, nothing is indefinite and nothing is truly free. If you aren't paying for a service, you are having your data sold.

[hotdogPi]

If someone is in poverty, there are other free services they can migrate to. Some of these free services do not allow hotlinking, which Photobucket did - and that starves the site of much-needed advertising revenue. And like what has stated above, Google and others only allow these freebie services (when they aren't truly free), because they can monetize your data.

It's akin to people complaining about Facebook or Instagram and the advertisements they host. Can you imagine the uproar if they went to a premium model? Or if they had a model where you could pay to dance around the ads? People expect these services to be free when in reality, they are very expensive ventures.

In the world of the web, nothing is indefinite and nothing is truly free. If you aren't paying for a service, you are having your data sold.

Flickr has no ads.

[AsphaltPlanet]

^ Flickr is only ad-free if you are a paid pro member.  If you aren't a paid member it's not ad-free either.

In general, if something on the internet is free, it's the user that is the product.