# Bye Bye, Photobucket



## Boatboy24 (Jun 30, 2017)

I've been using Photobucket for years to store some photos and post pictures using tags. Got an email from them today saying since I'm not a paying member, I will no longer be allowed to link to images in my account. Performance on the site has been getting steadily worse for a while and its been frustrating to say the least. Time to find an alternative. :re

To make matters worse for some, this already went into effect. So images that have been embedded no longer work. Way to give a heads up, Photobucket.

Alternative testing: trying to embed from Amazon Prime Photo. Couldn't make it work last time I tried. 

[img]https://content-na.drive.amazonaws.com/cdproxy/templink/FRNvj7oIKAFvSZNCgcoMqWvFTleBXmBTCKqgKMi4AHMpX92IB?viewBox=821%2C616


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## Johnd (Jun 30, 2017)

Boatboy24 said:


> I've been using Photobucket for years to store some photos and post pictures using tags. Got an email from them today saying since I'm not a paying member, I will no longer be allowed to link to images in my account. Performance on the site has been getting steadily worse for a while and its been frustrating to say the least. Time to find an alternative. :re
> 
> To make matters worse for some, this already went into effect. So images that have been embedded no longer work. Way to give a heads up, Photobucket.
> 
> ...



If your troubles would be resolved, why not pay a reasonable fee for the service?


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## ceeaton (Jun 30, 2017)

Johnd said:


> If your troubles would be resolved, why not pay a reasonable fee for the service?



He's saving money for that deck he's replacing!


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## Johnd (Jun 30, 2017)

ceeaton said:


> He's saving money for that deck he's replacing!



Doesn't sound like a few dollars dribbled into the photobucket would buy much deck anyway.........


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## Boatboy24 (Jun 30, 2017)

Johnd said:


> If your troubles would be resolved, why not pay a reasonable fee for the service?



$400 a year isn't a reasonable fee.


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## dralarms (Jun 30, 2017)

Boatboy24 said:


> $400 a year isn't a reasonable fee.



Dang, you could almost setupyour own server for that.


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## Boatboy24 (Jun 30, 2017)

dralarms said:


> Dang, you could almost setupyour own server for that.



I did - for less than that. No public access, but I can get to it from anywhere that I have a signal.


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## Johnd (Jun 30, 2017)

Boatboy24 said:


> $400 a year isn't a reasonable fee.



Well, that certainly doesn't seem like a reasonable fee, I wouldn't do that either!!!


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## ibglowin (Jun 30, 2017)

Dayum........


How much space do you need!



Boatboy24 said:


> $400 a year isn't a reasonable fee.


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## wineforfun (Jun 30, 2017)

I use befunky.com. Free service..................for now.
Or picmonkey.


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## dcbrown73 (Jun 30, 2017)

I use Google Photos. The best part is every time i take a photo with my phone, it automatically backs up to my Google Photos. You get unlimited storage too if you allow Google to optimize / compress the image in the cloud.


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## Boatboy24 (Jun 30, 2017)

ibglowin said:


> Dayum........
> 
> 
> How much space do you need!



Not a ton. But when clicking the link in their love letter, I was brought to an upgrade option at that price. Plenty of free options out there. At least for now.


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## Boatboy24 (Jun 30, 2017)

dcbrown73 said:


> I use Google Photos. The best part is every time i take a photo with my phone, it automatically backs up to my Google Photos. You get unlimited storage too if you allow Google to optimize / compress the image in the cloud.



Amazon is the same. But I think if you embed an image from there, they put a time limit on it. I'm experimenting. To be completely honest, the only reason I had the photobucket account was to embed images on another forum. Dealing with ads and popups seemed like a fair exchange for some limited photo storage. I don't need to do that to post pics here, obviously. 

I think they've figured out that people weren't actually using it to store and share photos and they weren't getting the traffic they'd hoped for. Their user experience and service has never been that great, so I imagine the bulk of their users were just using it the same way I was. The ads have gotten very numerous and aggressive of late and I guess this move is the latest to try and weed out the rif-raff and get down to the basics of true revenue-generating customers.


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## Putterrr (Jun 30, 2017)

My father always said "There is no free ride in life"

cheers


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## ibglowin (Jun 30, 2017)

There are a few politicians and national committees that thought that as well once upon a time!



Boatboy24 said:


> I did - for less than that. No public access.....


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## jswordy (Jul 9, 2017)

Johnd said:


> If your troubles would be resolved, why not pay a reasonable fee for the service?



Photobucket is asking for $400 a year or $40 a month from me (which is $480 a year!). While that may be fine for some of our well to do members, some of us regular working stiffs feel that's a steep price. They have lumped me in with professional photographers, who are getting remunerated for their work. Plus they POed me in the way they did it. Boom! Done. No chance to adjust.

I understand that their business model no longer works, and I understand that sites like this and others I am on have encouraged members to use Photobucket's free third-party service to upload content so the sites can then make money - it's what Photobucket encouraged. The days of free third-party hosting are going away, folks, so sooner or later all sites will have to bite the bullet and pay the freight to host their own pix. Two sites I am on now have done that for 20 years plus. I commend them. Every pic posted since the early 90s is still stored there.

Meanwhile, as mentioned here, there are still places we can run for pic hosting. But we cannot, in the end, hide forever. I hate the loss of institutional memory my favorite sites have undergone as a result of this. But "it's on the cloud" is going to cost more and more as they monetize it in coming years. Putting that on the backs of the users seems the inappropriate place for it to be, IMO.

I mod, and there are discussions going on now about what to do. It looks to me like the sites that don't host their own pix will run the risk of being usurped by FB over the long haul. Perhaps another company will see opportunity here. We'll see how it all shakes out.

Could be my pix look more like this now than an actual pic in the frame.

https://goo.gl/photos/UqTkAriFdRDrG7ke7


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## jswordy (Jul 9, 2017)

dcbrown73 said:


> I use Google Photos. The best part is every time i take a photo with my phone, it automatically backs up to my Google Photos. You get unlimited storage too if you allow Google to optimize / compress the image in the cloud.



I am still trying to figure out how to third-party link the Google pics to get them to come up in the frame as a photo and not a link. Help?


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## Johnd (Jul 9, 2017)

jswordy said:


> Photobucket is asking for $400 a year or $40 a month from me (which is $480 a year!). While that may be fine for some of our well to do members, some of us regular working stiffs feel that's a steep price.



Since you quoted me, I feel the need to respond. When I made that comment some time back, no fees were given, but when they were, I choked. For the record, I wouldn't spend any of my hard earned money to store pictures on someone else's storage space.


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## jswordy (Jul 9, 2017)

Johnd said:


> Since you quoted me, I feel the need to respond. When I made that comment some time back, no fees were given, but when they were, I choked. For the record, I wouldn't spend any of my hard earned money to store pictures on someone else's storage space.



Yeah, John, I saw your later comments after I posted. It used to be "don't worry, it's on the cloud" meant it was free hosted. Those days are almost gone now.

My view is, why should I PAY, when it is content that is going on a commercial site or forum where the SITE is making the ad dollars by me contributing for free. (Photobucket really screwed up Amazon, for example.) Photobucket wants the same dollars from me that they do a paid pro photographer. It seems to me they went about it the wrong way. Get the sites to pay. Anyway, there are lots of software companies that have discussion packages that have a hosting component. It just costs the site more. But that is the way it is going.

And sure enough, LOL, if you go to Google News and search "Photobucket," OMG! Here's just a couple...

https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/4/15919224/photobucket-broken-images-amazon-ebay-etsy-paid-update

http://nypost.com/2017/07/05/how-photobucket-is-now-shaking-down-its-users/

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40492668

They'll never get a dime from me! I spent half the day today getting my pix back out of there, until the site went down. Probably overloaded with folks doing the same!

The cynic in me says Photobucket did this to get eBay or Amazon to buy them up. We'll see.


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## Boatboy24 (Jul 9, 2017)

I refuse to take my pics from there - I still have copies of everything there on my NAS and/or hard drive. In fact, I'm feeling malicious and might just load more, to max out my storage. They are getting exactly what they want from most non-paying users, which is deletion of all their photos. Now, they have all that much more storage space that they can use for paying members.


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## jswordy (Jul 9, 2017)

Boatboy24 said:


> I refuse to take my pics from there - I still have copies of everything there on my NAS and/or hard drive. In fact, I'm feeling malicious and might just load more, to max out my storage. They are getting exactly what they want from most non-paying users, which is deletion of all their photos. Now, they have all that much more storage space that they can use for paying members.



Like I say, I spent 4 1/2 hours today downloading pix and got about 3/4 of the way through mine before the site went down. Shows how active I am online. I think PB is trying to get Amazon or eBay to buy it up, just to have that platform. Thank God two of my hobby forums have hosted their own pix since the beginning. The rest are in various states of shambles. 

My worst hit was in a 10-year running car build thread on a car forum. Every single photo of my project has been blanked, and it will take a lot of work to reconstruct that. It runs to 38 pages. And I still don't have a solution to posting pix going forward, personally.

I will remove all my photos from PB when I get them all downloaded. There is language that is worrisome about photo rights in the new ToS, too. I think PB is going to go down because of this. Handled badly and overpriced. I hated all the pop-up ads but this really takes it!


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## Boatboy24 (Jul 9, 2017)

The ads were horrendous, but the free price tag made that acceptable and understandable. I get that they need to make $$ and it costs a lot to host billions of images. But as you said, @jswordy , the way they went about it is [email protected]#d up. Let me know that in 30 days my links will die and I'll b1tch, but will get over it, and just might sign up for some sort of subscription. But do it the way they did it and its a no-brainer that most folks will give them the finger and move on.


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## jswordy (Jul 9, 2017)

I'd love it if they would just put the site back up here so I can get my remaining pix out. Most I have backups of, but it never hurts to get them. I'm reloading them into Google Photos. And ya know, $9.99 a month, I can do that. But $40? No. And all so I can post for free onto sites who use my activity to make money? Double no. 

Test...






WOOT! Google Photo.

How I did this:

1.) Call up single image in Google Photo.
2.) Right click on image.
3.) Click "Copy Image Location."
4.) Come over here and type .
5.) Paste the image location immediately after that.
6.)Type. Should look like



.
6. Preview or Submit.


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## jswordy (Jul 9, 2017)

And wow, all these years and I never knew this forum had a direct upload feature. Yep!

Click the paperclip. Browse for file. Upload it. Close window. Go back to paperclip. Click on file shown there. Attach it. Done. The pix run big and it looks like they may be vertically challenged, but it gets it done.


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## ceeaton (Jul 9, 2017)

jswordy said:


> And wow, all these years and I never knew this forum had a direct upload feature. Yep!
> 
> Click the paperclip. Browse for file. Upload it. Close window. Go back to paperclip. Click on file shown there. Attach it. Done. The pix run big and it looks like they may be vertically challenged, but it gets it done.



I thought that was the only way to do it. I wondered why people would use another location for the images, but then again, this is the only forum I am on, I could see having a central location if you are on several of them. Guess I need to expand my horizons, just don't want to fall off the edge or anything.


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## jswordy (Jul 10, 2017)

ceeaton said:


> I thought that was the only way to do it. I wondered why people would use another location for the images, but then again, this is the only forum I am on, I could see having a central location if you are on several of them. Guess I need to expand my horizons, just don't want to fall off the edge or anything.



Yep, I am on several. It was an easy way to post pix. Some forums only allow third-party links, so it's the only way there. I still have about 25% of my shots on PB, and they are being stingy about letting go of them. You can get one album download before they quit on you. I suspect they are trying to slow down a mass rush to the doors.


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## Boatboy24 (Jul 10, 2017)

@jswordy: you can also click on the 'Manage Attachments' button.


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## dcbrown73 (Jul 13, 2017)

jswordy said:


> I am still trying to figure out how to third-party link the Google pics to get them to come up in the frame as a photo and not a link. Help?



Yep, I jump through hoops for that also.

Here is how I do it.

1. In Google Photos. Click on the photo. ( I was at the Amateur Radio Relay League (ARRL) today)
2. Click on the share button.




3. Click on the "Get Link" button.




4. Click Copy.




5. Paste that in a new URL address bar, then click on the image when it appears to make it full screen.
6. Right click on the image and choose copy image address (in Google Chrome anyhow)
7. Use that address as the image address you are using to paste the image address. (below is the ARRL radio station (W1AW )I was at today)


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## jswordy (Jul 17, 2017)

Thanks, David. I independently figured that out myself on PC. Still trying to figure out how to get it to work on Mac. And I am trying to figure out something that will work universally across forums, since I am on several. Man.


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## bein_bein (Aug 12, 2017)

I could have written the original post almost word for word... I backed up all my photos from photobucket and deleted my account. Pure BS in my opinion and complete greed. I have a feeling photobucket will go the way of 'my space' for those of you that remember pre-FaceBook times  I use Flickr for posting online and was transitioning over when PB pulled the rug out.


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## jswordy (Aug 14, 2017)

In case someone wants to embed Google Photos....

https://ctrlq.org/google/photos/?_ga=2.96546651.512844688.1499147083-734234969.1499147083

Go


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