RIP Photobucket...

[Megaflow]

Testing:



Not that it matters if it works or not, they will get round to everybody eventually, so I have started to remove what I want to keep.

[Nigel_O]

Even though I paid for PB Pro for several years (only dropping back to the free account in the last few months), my third-party hosting has been removed too

Just spent the morning setting up an Imgur account and transferring all my images across

Now starts the long process of editing forum threads with images.....

I get that it was free and they have the right to do what they want, but some notice would have been nice. LogMeIn used to have a free screen-share app that they eventually pulled, but at least they gave loads of notice.

Poor corporate decision I fear, but the service was getting to the point where account holders were leaving in their droves anyway. Maybe this is PB's way of driving down the bandwidth to increase the speeds for those poor sods that can't find time to re-host their images and have to get the chequebook out....

[gus607]

Just gone to Postimage, much better than PB free too.



http://download.cnet.com/Postimage/3000-13455_4-75...

[JB!]

Funk said:

I hate to think how many fora this will impact; think how many 'How To..' and build threads will now just be filled with the 'No 3rd party' image above...!

It brings back up an interesting conversation about how, despite living in an age where we can make/take and share more writing and pictures than ever before, we'll actually be a 'black hole' to future generations. We're able to read books, documents and look at pictures from hundreds or thousands of years ago; will people in another 500 years be able to see or read all the pictures and documents we've created? We no long print things out, we're storing digitally - think about documents you put on floppy disk only 20 years ago, it would be a challenge to recover that even today...

Chapppers said:

I'm surprised there wasn't more outrage when Dropbox did it? That was a massive pain in the arse for me, I'd stopped using photobucket years ago.

I've never really used Dropbox for image hosting, more for backup. However, the capacity is limited and I'm in the process of migrating everything to Google Photos/Drive which has about 7x more space for free.

Edited by Funk on Thursday 29th June 10:12

This is already a massive headache!

Anything older than 5y/o is a massive gap as some forums have died or people have stopped hosting or whatever, build threads gone, googlecache unable to find pictures etc.

I regularly use a 10 year old forum-written wiring guide, so much so we've saved the page, so we have a local cache!

I do think they'll be a "lost knowledge" generation.

[TameRacingDriver]

JB! said:

This is already a massive headache!

Anything older than 5y/o is a massive gap as some forums have died or people have stopped hosting or whatever, build threads gone, googlecache unable to find pictures etc.

I regularly use a 10 year old forum-written wiring guide, so much so we've saved the page, so we have a local cache!

I do think they'll be a "lost knowledge" generation.

It seems prudent now to keep offline copies of anything you can't afford to lose.

[NoIP]

gus607 said:

Just gone to Postimage, much better than PB free too.

http://download.cnet.com/Postimage/3000-13455_4-75...

Hmm, a no-name free image hosting site that no-one's heard of and not been around that long. What could possibly go wrong.

[Prohibiting]

How annoying!

I've been using photobucket for a few years and have a few hundred photo's uploaded to there. I've also got loads of photos posted on various forums and threads on the Internet over these years... now all irrelevant...

Gonna get set up on Imgur then.

[lucido grigio]

lucido grigio said:

Pics I have here are still showing.

I haven't uploaded any new ones to PB for couple of years.



still working ?

And now it's gone.
Pic was showing yesterday,just noticed same in another thread,so checked back here.

[zygalski]

Takes ages to download each album & I only have 25 albums with 400 or so photos in total.
What a totally suicidal business decision.
Only trouble is, with perhaps several billion images being shifted to other free sites, how long before they charge too?

[droopsnoot]

zygalski said:

Takes ages to download each album & I only have 25 albums with 400 or so photos in total.

Yes, I've only got 300Mb used, and it's taking the thing ages to generate each zip file. Still, you don't have to wait, it'll send an email when it's ready.

Wouldn't have killed them to give the zip files a meaningful name, such as the album name, instead of the junk they call it.

[BossHogg]

Downloaded everything from my PB account, time to delete everything and tell them to go forth and multiply.

[Nik da Greek]

Seems like some sort of global protest has begun. I've already seen a few avatars popping up like...





It's tragic really when you think how many build threads, how many show reports, how many How-to guides on forums all over the world have just been comprehensively and utterly fked

[lucido grigio]

Nik da Greek said:

It's tragic really when you think how many build threads, how many show reports, how many How-to guides on forums all over the world have just been comprehensively and utterly fked

Yes ,this ,my reader's car thread first page is now a mass of blankness.

Luckily a lot of the later pics were taken with phone and posted with Thumbsnap.

[Sillyhatday]

I'm half way to shifting over to Imgur. Sorted one of my threads out, but my other one is on two forums, at 8-10 pages long. No doubt others are worse off.

I've used PB since 2006 if not before, it was that or imageshack. Back then you didn't even need an account.

[RDMcG]

Just tried it and it works fine....I do not have some mega cost membership...

[RBH58]

Doesn't seem to be a sudden "cut off". It seems to be being slowly deployed across the membership. Their revised terms are very clear though. If you want to do 3rd party embedding of PB images, it's going to cost you $399 per year. Which is laughable. If they'd wanted to hold us to ransom, I would have probably paid $39 and I reckon they'd have generated 10 times the revenue they are going to generate with this greedy grab. They are going to get so many account closures with this. It's going to leave a lot of forums with gaping image gaps though. I really hope they go out of business!

[PurpleMoonlight]

What's the best alternative?

I tried tinypic recently for a post on PH and it instantly banned me for breaching their t&c's.

[jmorgan]

PurpleMoonlight said:

What's the best alternative?

I tried tinypic recently for a post on PH and it instantly banned me for breaching their t&c's.

Flickr, 1tb free. You can keep images private on there as well.

Personally I avoid google as their t+c are a bit off putting.

[PurpleMoonlight]

jmorgan said:

Flickr, 1tb free. You can keep images private on there as well.

Personally I avoid google as their t+c are a bit off putting.

Ta, I've opened an account and uploaded a few pics to test.

How to I access the code to embed to the likes of PH please?

[Sammo123]

PurpleMoonlight said:

Ta, I've opened an account and uploaded a few pics to test.

How to I access the code to embed to the likes of PH please?

I've done this but I'm really struggling with the app. It doesn't seem all that simple to upload into the correct folders and then get the image code. I'm sure it's simple once you know how but I'm getting quite frustrated with it.