Photobucket - Please Read

[♥ ℒʊ√ ♥]

Jul 1, 2017 14:19:32 GMT -8 Skidjit said:

Thanks. I'm Just about to make an announcement to the members of my site. One of my members is not really tech savvy. He runs on the side (his family) website selling antiques. I do believe he's only aquainted with photobucket. I need to get all of this info to him before all of this comes as a shock.

Then there are some members that might be using photobucket (I'm not sure) to for their blog. Just need to let them know.

I think I've pretty much backed up most of my own images to a thumb drive. I need to find it and see what's not on it and add to it. Still, that's not to say I need to deal with what I have running all of my sites. I've never heard of nickpic. I'll definitely check them out. Thanks bunches ♥ ℒʊ√ ♥ you're a life saver.

You're welcome, Skidjit . 

None of us were prepared for this huge change from free to $400. Quite honestly, I would have been willing to pay $99.99 for a year for the service recognizing the expense of image hosting, but not $400.00

I'm using NickPic (recommended by Tinselled Loki) and Village Photos that I discovered. Both are good. Check each out and see which you prefer.

[adminabp]

Jul 1, 2017 14:05:33 GMT -8 ♥ ℒʊ√ ♥ said:

Jul 1, 2017 13:37:49 GMT -8 queenfoxy said:

This would be great for someone with minimal storage needs, because their max storage limit is 8 MB.

That's really such a small amount of storage.

It may suit an immediate need, but one should always keep the unknown future in mind.

There are far better alternatives that have been mentioned here and they're free and have far greater storage capacity.

Why would one deliberately limit themselves, even if it suits a present need?

Well, for one thing, you can always use it in conjunction with other sites, as another arrow in the quiver. Say you kept your Awards System images there, your Monetary Shop images on Photobucket, etc.

Photobucket goes away or something like all this happens, you aren't stuck having to rebuild your ENTIRE site's images from scratch.

I wasn't using Photobucket for site stuff, just my own personal images, but after seeing the disruption this has caused so many forums I'm definitely looking to diversify my hosting across multiple hosts, so as to minimize any future disruptions.

[Kami]

Jul 1, 2017 14:27:05 GMT -8 ♥ ℒʊ√ ♥ said:

Quite honestly, I would have been willing to pay $99.99 for a year for the service recognizing the expense of image hosting, but not $400.00

THIS. Some charges are reasonable I feel because of the expenses of this type of service, and I feel like with some forewarning and reasonable service plans, this would not be such a huge deal. I don't think any loyal photobucket users would have refused to pay if the company was forthright about their reasonings and had plans that's included what people use them for (hotlinking) without the corporate level price tag.

[Barkley]

Jul 1, 2017 13:53:03 GMT -8 leif said:

This is frustrating. A lot of my earliest work on ProBoards from 10+ years ago is on PhotoBucket.

ImgBox said they're going to shutdown (and reversed it, but good chance they'll shut down). TinyPic is also owned by PhotoBucket and may face something similar soon.

I'm glad I made my own and left all of these hosts.

I think your work is still hosted on Photobucket.

It's just that the 3rd party hosting has been stopped, so you'd need to right click on each image, copy the image address, paste it into Google, and then download the image before re-hosting. A long process for sure.

[Kami]

Jul 1, 2017 14:34:00 GMT -8 adminabp said:

Jul 1, 2017 14:05:33 GMT -8 ♥ ℒʊ√ ♥ said:

That's really such a small amount of storage.

It may suit an immediate need, but one should always keep the unknown future in mind.

There are far better alternatives that have been mentioned here and they're free and have far greater storage capacity.

Why would one deliberately limit themselves, even if it suits a present need?

Well, for one thing, you can always use it in conjunction with other sites, as another arrow in the quiver. Say you kept your Awards System images there, your Monetary Shop images on Photobucket, etc.

Photobucket goes away or something like all this happens, you aren't stuck having to rebuild your ENTIRE site's images from scratch.

I wasn't using Photobucket for site stuff, just my own personal images, but after seeing the disruption this has caused so many forums I'm definitely looking to diversify my hosting across multiple hosts, so as to minimize any future disruptions.

Ostensibly though one would keep copies of currently in-use files locally which makes this unnecessarily convoluted.

[♥ ℒʊ√ ♥]

Jul 1, 2017 14:34:56 GMT -8 Barkley said:

Jul 1, 2017 13:53:03 GMT -8 leif said:

This is frustrating. A lot of my earliest work on ProBoards from 10+ years ago is on PhotoBucket.

ImgBox said they're going to shutdown (and reversed it, but good chance they'll shut down). TinyPic is also owned by PhotoBucket and may face something similar soon.

I'm glad I made my own and left all of these hosts.

I think your work is still hosted on Photobucket.

It's just that the 3rd party hosting has been stopped, so you'd need to right click on each image, copy the image address, paste it into Google, and then download the image before re-hosting. A long process for sure.

Sadly, as P'Bucket is going through accounts and finding those who are using their links on 3rd party sites, they are being locked out of their accounts until the $400 is paid.

However, if you right click on the image P'Bucket puts in the image's place on the 3rd party's site, you can open the address in a new tab and see the image and download it to your computer.


Hopefully, most have their original photos on their own external drives, thumb drives, etc. I do. They don't have anything I need ~ except the right for me to place those images on 3rd party sites as was the company's original intent for the site.

[adminabp]

Jul 1, 2017 14:36:11 GMT -8 Kami said:

Jul 1, 2017 14:34:00 GMT -8 adminabp said:

Well, for one thing, you can always use it in conjunction with other sites, as another arrow in the quiver. Say you kept your Awards System images there, your Monetary Shop images on Photobucket, etc.

Photobucket goes away or something like all this happens, you aren't stuck having to rebuild your ENTIRE site's images from scratch.

I wasn't using Photobucket for site stuff, just my own personal images, but after seeing the disruption this has caused so many forums I'm definitely looking to diversify my hosting across multiple hosts, so as to minimize any future disruptions.

Ostensibly though one would keep copies of currently in-use files locally which makes this unnecessarily convoluted.

With the expansion plugins to the Monetary Shop, it's possible to have hundreds of images hosted somewhere just for that one plugin. You throw in Awards System, New On/Off Icons, Additional Smiles and a few others, you could easily have over a thousand images needing hosting and hotlinking to.

You put that all in ONE place, and then you have something like this happen with Photobucket, your whole site looks like a broken mess while you spend a crazy amount of time and effort restoring everything.

I'd rather diversify a bit and minimize the potential headache of a major disruption.

[Former Member]

Hosting and storage. can be quite cheep, infact FREE to some degree.

Bandwidth/upload/download is where the cost actually occurs. Now this can be quite minimal If your requests are coming from the same region(america for example). But what if you set your target region as US and have alot of request's coming from Asia/Australia/South America ?

Then your costs multiply.

[Kami]

Jul 1, 2017 15:02:47 GMT -8 adminabp said:

Jul 1, 2017 14:36:11 GMT -8 Kami said:

Ostensibly though one would keep copies of currently in-use files locally which makes this unnecessarily convoluted.

With the expansion plugins to the Monetary Shop, it's possible to have hundreds of images hosted somewhere just for that one plugin. You throw in Awards System, New On/Off Icons, Additional Smiles and a few others, you could easily have over a thousand images needing hosting and hotlinking to.

You put that all in ONE place, and then you have something like this happen with Photobucket, your whole site looks like a broken mess while you spend a crazy amount of time and effort restoring everything.

I'd rather diversify a bit and minimize the potential headache of a major disruption.

This reply to me makes no sense.

1. If x host goes down you'd have to replace images anyway from your backup host(s)

2. keeping a local copy (as in, on your hard drive, or external storage device) limits the need for multiple online backups. Just reupload to a new host and go.

So again, ostensibly one would have local backups for any current content they are using.

[Barkley]

Jul 1, 2017 14:59:39 GMT -8 ♥ ℒʊ√ ♥ said:

Jul 1, 2017 14:34:56 GMT -8 Barkley said:

I think your work is still hosted on Photobucket.

It's just that the 3rd party hosting has been stopped, so you'd need to right click on each image, copy the image address, paste it into Google, and then download the image before re-hosting. A long process for sure.

Sadly, as P'Bucket is going through accounts and finding those who are using their links on 3rd party sites, they are being locked out of their accounts until the $400 is paid.

However, if you right click on the image P'Bucket puts in the image's place on the 3rd party's site, you can open the address in a new tab and see the image and download it to your computer.


Hopefully, most have their original photos on their own external drives, thumb drives, etc. I do. They don't have anything I need ~ except the right for me to place those images on 3rd party sites as was the company's original intent for the site

Thank you, I'd never have thought of that. 

[adminabp]

Jul 1, 2017 15:23:41 GMT -8 Kami said:

Jul 1, 2017 15:02:47 GMT -8 adminabp said:

With the expansion plugins to the Monetary Shop, it's possible to have hundreds of images hosted somewhere just for that one plugin. You throw in Awards System, New On/Off Icons, Additional Smiles and a few others, you could easily have over a thousand images needing hosting and hotlinking to.

You put that all in ONE place, and then you have something like this happen with Photobucket, your whole site looks like a broken mess while you spend a crazy amount of time and effort restoring everything.

I'd rather diversify a bit and minimize the potential headache of a major disruption.

This reply to me makes no sense.

1. If x host goes down you'd have to replace images anyway from your backup host(s)

2. keeping a local copy (as in, on your hard drive, or external storage device) limits the need for multiple online backups. Just reupload to a new host and go.

So again, ostensibly one would have local backups for any current content they are using.

Right, but if all your images are not at one host, and one goes down, you don't have to go to the time and effort(upload image, get link, add link to plugin, and even if you bulk upload the photos, you're still stuck getting the individual image link and then adding it to each individual item, a time consuming and tedious process) for EVERYTHING on your whole site, at one time.

Say you have all your Monetary Shop items with one host, and it's a few hundred images, but you have everything else (lets say roughly the same amount of images) on another host. If one of those hosts goes down for some reason, the amount of images that have to be rehosted, new links gotten and added individually to each item in a plugin, is cut in half.

For some sites, it will not be hours of work fixing this, it will be DAYS of tedious, time-consuming work. Often for sites with generally no paid staff. Often just the one owner who does all the stuff involving hosting and linking. Often only in their spare time away from their day-job and life in general. For some forums it will be a major impact on the functionality of their site until things are fixed. The less disruption and downtime a site has, the better.

It's not like this is an isolated incident with Photobucket, Imgur did something similar just last year. It's not like this is only affecting people with free accounts, this affected everyone with a paid account on Photobucket that was anything below their top tier($39.99 a month, $399 a year) plan.

I'm just saying if a site uses a lot of hosted images for things like plugins, it might be prudent to spread them around a bit, and minimize the impact of a potential future disruption.

[Kami]

Jul 1, 2017 17:46:24 GMT -8 adminabp said:

Jul 1, 2017 15:23:41 GMT -8 Kami said:

This reply to me makes no sense.

1. If x host goes down you'd have to replace images anyway from your backup host(s)

2. keeping a local copy (as in, on your hard drive, or external storage device) limits the need for multiple online backups. Just reupload to a new host and go.

So again, ostensibly one would have local backups for any current content they are using.

Right, but if all your images are not at one host, and one goes down, you don't have to go to the time and effort(upload image, get link, add link to plugin, and even if you bulk upload the photos, you're still stuck getting the individual image link and then adding it to each individual item, a time consuming and tedious process) for EVERYTHING on your whole site, at one time.

Say you have all your Monetary Shop items with one host, and it's a few hundred images, but you have everything else (lets say roughly the same amount of images) on another host. If one of those hosts goes down for some reason, the amount of images that have to be rehosted, new links gotten and added individually to each item in a plugin, is cut in half.

For some sites, it will not be hours of work fixing this, it will be DAYS of tedious, time-consuming work. Often for sites with generally no paid staff. Often just the one owner who does all the stuff involving hosting and linking. Often only in their spare time away from their day-job and life in general. For some forums it will be a major impact on the functionality of their site until things are fixed. The less disruption and downtime a site has, the better.

It's not like this is an isolated incident with Photobucket, Imgur did something similar just last year. It's not like this is only affecting people with free accounts, this affected everyone with a paid account on Photobucket that was anything below their top tier($39.99 a month, $399 a year) plan.

I'm just saying if a site uses a lot of hosted images for things like plugins, it might be prudent to spread them around a bit, and minimize the impact of a potential future disruption.

Honestly, the logic escapes me here but that's okay. If it works for others then that's all that matters!

[Stinky666]

Jul 1, 2017 13:37:49 GMT -8 queenfoxy said:

Jul 1, 2017 7:54:48 GMT -8 Stinky666 said:

For anyone interested, imageupload.co.uk seems to be fine
Knowing me I am missing the terms saying it's forbidden ??

This would be great for someone with minimal storage needs, because their max storage limit is 8 MB.

I'm pretty sure that's 8mb PER image, if you're uploading an image bigger than that, it's either a BMP and you should convert, or it's a GIF (or similar), and there are better suited sites for GIFS.

[Former Member]

i ain't doing anything, imgur said this last yr but i've still got 100's of imgur images that are still there, i had 1 photobucket img disappear and the rest still there.

if they go they go, i'll change them when they do if they do that is.

[Tumbleweed]

Even though I totally understand Photobucket has to make a profit, it still sucks and especially since, after sitting on not opening my forum for years, finally I just did a few weeks ago and now I will have to move all my images someplace else.  That's well over 3,000 images and I doubt I'll do it. So far my site hasn't been affected but I'm sure my time will come soon. I do have most of my images on flash drives and such and did (as soon as I heard about this) download some older personal images that weren't backed up and need to have one last good look to make sure I didn't miss anything.

It's frustrating to say the least and I wish they had offered more reasonable packages to pick from, I might have considered paying say $100 a year. What they want is way too much, if you ask me. But they must be either losing money or close to it and seems to me a last ditch effort to keep from going belly up.

♥ ℒʊ√ ♥, Thanks for doing the leg work and finding some alternatives.