Photobucket

Badlad

Administrator
Staff member
For the last few years I've used Photobucket to store photos on the web.  My primary reason was to enable me to post photos on sites like ukcaving using the url.  This worked very well until yesterday when I got an email saying I needed to upgrade my account to allow 'third party hosting'.  At the same time all the photos I had linked from photobucket went blank.  I'm not against paying a small fee to upgrade but was shocked to find out it cost $400 per year.

I'm hoping to find a cheap long term solution so that photos will stay 'live' into the long term.  Can anyone help with suggestions?
 

NewStuff

New member
Imgur. http://imgur.com/ It's free.

You do not have to post pictures to the "main gallery", and youhave some degree of control over hiding/making public images and albums.

I used to have a "pro" account with photobucket that had a monthly fee, but they nuked that option and went for the advertising only route. They've been fading into obscurity ever since, and this will just hasten that fade.

Or, buy some webhosting and dump the pictures on that.
 

Antwan

Member
Silly question, but dont you have space on the UKC servers to upload images if you are paying server fees etc...?

If its the ease of uploading with a drag and drop type system your after there are plenty of free online gallery systems you can use.


Will be up at the YSS next weekend if you want a chat about it. Could set you up your own webspace and gallery to use for about ?25 a year if you dont want to rely on any other sites remaining free.

Flickr for example let you share pictures but to abide by the terms you need the link back to flickr so they have the possibility of advertising revenue which of course photobucket werent getting and when folk strip the flickr urls, flickr also loose out.
 

The Old Ruminator

Well-known member
This is quite serious as many friends are now in limbo with all forum image posts reduced to links. It seems the poster will have to pay $399 a year to make them hosted images again.
I have 10,000 plus hosted images on the web and I am assuming they will all now " disappear ". All my threads here will then have no images and will effectively be ruined. I will not be paying such a huge fee to resurrect them. You can shop around for more third party hosting sites but now it is obvious that they cannot be trusted to maintain your images long term. Its a very sad situation which will seriously damage site such as this. I will need to see how things pan out.
 

Vulcan

Member
You can get URLs from an image on Onedrive. I have used this to embed it into a web page before. Not sure if this can be done on other cloud storage sites or not. 
 

The Old Ruminator

Well-known member
PhotoBucket now charges $399 for third-party hosted images



If you have visited a website recently that displays images hosted on Photobucket, or are embedding images hosted on Photobucket on your own, you may have had a rather rude awakening one day as Photobucket decided to block these images from being displayed on third-party sites.

All Photobucket images hosted on third-party sites, at least from what we can tell, are replaced by a dummy image. It reads: Please update your account to enable 3rd party hosting. For important info, please go to www.photobucket.com/P500.

According to some users that we spoke with who are affected by this, this happened without prior notice or any form of warning on Photobucket's part.




Photobucket defines third-party hosting (what is with using 3rd instead of third?) as embedding an image or photo on another website. This includes embedding photos on forums, eBay, Etsy, Craigslist or another other site on the Internet that is not Photobucket.com.

When you open the referenced page on the Photobucket website, you are informed that you may restore the third-party hosted content by becoming a Plus 500 subscriber.

A Plus 500 plan allows for unlimited third-party hosting, and provides members with other benefits such as an ad-free browsing environment on the Photobucket site, priority customer support, or full resolution photo storage.

Photobucket offers three paid plans to members, but only the most expensive plan supports third-party hosting of images. It is available for $39.99 per month, or at a discount when billed yearly for $399.99.

According to Photobucket, the site has more than 100 million unique users who have stored more than 15 billion images on its servers.

For users who are affected by this, it is important to note that the images are not gone. They are still hosted on Photobucket, and you can actually load them right then and there by right-clicking on them and selecting "open image in new tab" or "open link in new tab" depending on the web browser that you are using. This opens the Photobucket website where the original image is displayed.

The problem right now is however that Photobucket has been used as a host for images for years on many sites on the Internet. And it is not even the case that the site owner can do something about it if other members of the site have embedded photos from Photobucket as the disabling is account linked.

All members of a site who used Photobucket in the past would have to sign up for the -- rather expensive I might say -- Plus 500 plan to restore the old functionality. This is not practicable at all, and it won't happen.

As far as alternatives are concerned, there is Imgur for instance which supports the embedding of images on third-party sites.

While members of Photobucket may wait and hope that the company reverses the stance on third-party hosted images, it is probably better to migrate the photos to another hosting service entirely.

You can download your entire library of images by selecting Library on Photobucket, and there the download album link under actions.
Closing Words

Photobucket may make a quick buck from the unannounced change, as some members may feel pressured in paying up so that their images are displayed again on third-party sites.

I think however that many more will leave Photobucket and use another service instead for image hosting. This may be fueled by site-wide bans of the service.

The plan is overpriced in my opinion, not only because there are free alternatives available out there, but also because you may sign up for a VPS or web hosting account instead for a fraction of the price that Photobucket charges.

Even if it would be priced reasonably, and Photobucket has any right to adjust its pricing, blocking images without prior notice or migration options, especially since this was free before, is not the most elegant of ways to go about it.

Copied in from my other forum.

With a lack of images on forums and totally destroyed threads. The danger is more people will revert to Facebook.



 

tony from suffolk

Well-known member
It seems Photobucket, by springing this on us, has comprehensively shot itself in the foot. I really cannot imagine many folk coughing up such a sum, and it'll spawn a great deal of resentment. I've set up a Flickr account now, so Photobucket can go hang themselves.
 

NewStuff

New member
tony from suffolk said:
I've set up a Flickr account now,

Just be aware that Flickr are marching down the same road, albeit not as far down it. I used to have a Flickr Pro after the Photobucket option stopped being feasible. That stopped being feasible as well, so don't be surprised if it goes bang as well.
 

Pegasus

Administrator
Staff member
Thanks for all the info and advice.

Photobucket can indeed go hang themselves, planning a few evenings going through my old posts and reloading images  :halo:
 

Pegasus

Administrator
Staff member
Antwan said:
Silly question, but dont you have space on the UKC servers to upload images if you are paying server fees etc...?

If its the ease of uploading with a drag and drop type system your after there are plenty of free online gallery systems you can use.


Will be up at the YSS next weekend if you want a chat about it. Could set you up your own webspace and gallery to use for about ?25 a year if you dont want to rely on any other sites remaining free.

Flickr for example let you share pictures but to abide by the terms you need the link back to flickr so they have the possibility of advertising revenue which of course photobucket werent getting and when folk strip the flickr urls, flickr also loose out.

Hi Antwan, may I take you up on your offer of a chat about all this blummin photo technology? Have sent you a PM, thanks, Jane
 

The Old Ruminator

Well-known member
No hope of reformatting my stuff.

Public Stats

    20,672 photos

Post Image is still Quick and Easy but for how long.

Just trying a Post Image one here --



Sod all to do with caving but it is a pot.
 

pwhole

Well-known member
It's very unlikely that many companies will offer free storage space these days without some sort of 'catch' - after all, the servers required to store all the data have to be paid for, and if advertising doesn't work (which it doesn't), then they have to make some money out of it somewhere else. Ten billion images is a lot of space, especially if not scaled and compressed effectively. That amount is patently ridiculous though, and is unlikely to gain them any new custom now.

The easiest solution is just to rent some webspace, buy a domain, and then just dump all your images there instead. It doesn't have to be a 'website' as such if you don't want one, just put a blank 'index.htm' in the root folder and any subfolders (if you use them) and then folks can't go any deeper without your links. There's also plenty of cheap but good image-gallery software out there that will generate a folder-based gallery that will work in all browsers and on mobiles, etc. My web hosting costs me $9.95 a month, so about six quid, and I have 20GB of storage, which is more than enough for me as I only upload jpgs. A domain is less than a tenner, and once you've got one, it's a handy platform for all sorts. The only possible cost increase is bandwidth, if your images become wildly popular worldwide, as then the server keeps getting hit, and they'll want more money...
 

Sid

Member
I have used Flickr for 7+ years for MCRA. This has worked very well and we can make available complete albums and images that fall outside the formal archive.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mendipcaveregistryarchive/albums

With the sale of Yahoo and the possibility of 'changes' i have looked at other options. One we have on trial uses a Synology NAS working off home broadband and the bundled Photo Station software. We have tested using bandwith between 10mb and 100mb with no issues.

This means we can make available the complete MCRA photo archive of over 17K images. The images are at a similar resolution to Flickr and are backed up elsewhere.

The downside is you loose the casual visitor directed from a Google search, rely on home broadband and the initial outlay for hardware.

Plus side is you dont need a fixed IP as Synology include a 'quickconnect' in the setup.

Trialing continues..........



 

tony from suffolk

Well-known member
I think we all accept that we will probably have to pay for this type of service in future, and a few quid a month for most folks' useage would surely be a good business model. If Photobucket had just politely informed us we'd now have to pay, say, ?3 a month for 20GB of storage, with a sliding scale for greater storage, rather than the ridiculous approach they've chosen to take, I cannot imagine many folks would object too much. I've no doubt Flickr will eventually find itself charging us accordingly but hopefully they'll possess rather more business acumen that the other bunch of clowns.
 

Mike Hopley

New member
One option that people may not be aware of is an image management service like Cloudinary or Sirv. Although these are marketed for web developers, they are quite simple to use.

These services let you do stuff like resize an image on-the-fly, just by changing the link. They are also really fast.

The downside is that if you outgrow the free plan, they do get expensive.
 
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