Hostage of Photobucket

[08FJR4ME]

No longer a Hostage!

All pictures removed and account deleted. Never going back. There adds were a pain in the *** anyway. Most likely people were leaving just for that reason alone. I don't expect them to be around much longer.

Dave

 

[garauld]

I created a new account on Imgur and put a bunch of my photos up there. I then updated the links in some threads. What a friggin' PITA...

 

[hppants]

https://support.photobucket.com/hc/en-us/articles/115010128088-What-users-are-affected-by-the-changes-to-our-3rd-Party-Hosting-policies-


What users are affected by the changes to our 3rd Party Hosting policies?



Moving forward, new and legacy free account users will NOT have third party
hosting available.

If you were a Plus Account subscriber in good standing as of June 1, 2017,
you will continue to have all the privileges you have enjoyed including 3rd
Party Hosting until December 31, 2018 as long as you maintain your
subscription.

Non Plus 500 Account subscribers that purchased after June 1, 2017 will not
have access to 3rd Party Hosting.

 

[Fred W]

Guess I'm good until 2019. Don't know if I'll even be alive by then.

 

[08FJR4ME]

I created a new account on Imgur and put a bunch of my photos up there. I then updated the links in some threads. What a friggin' PITA...

Yeh, I am not looking forward to doing that either.

I would rather be riding,

 

[FJRPittsburgh]

Ditto..... Deleted my PB account. YAY!

 

[Uncle Hud]

FJRPittsburgh posted: Ditto..... Deleted my PB account. YAY!

Funny -- maybe -- that your signature line is now 5 times larger than your post.

 

[RossKean]

Whether they look at it this way or not, Photobucket has just posted tens of millions of "I hate Photobucket" ads all over the Internet. Every time anyone (Photobucket customer, or not) goes to a page expecting photographic content, they see the "Update your account" message. Instead of making that individual think paying $400 a year is a good idea, it is certain to piss off current customers (or freeloaders like me) and guarantee that future prospective customers find an alternate service.

If they had come out with a bit of a soft-sell and a program for those who have a few hundred photos attached to forum posts or niche blogs without large bandwidth demands, they would have done much better. I am an individual who doesn't post a large number of pictures and I'm sure they don't get thousands of "reads" per day so why should I choose (and pay for) a service that would allow essentially unlimited bandwidth and gigabytes of storage space? I'm not exactly an internationally known blogger or columnist. I'm not even a small business owner looking to do some commercial transactions on the web. A low cost program for low bandwidth, non-commercial customers would be appropriate. Perhaps they want to drop all the small customers and focus their efforts on commercial entities or those who have so much content invested with Photobucket that they are willing to pay the (effective) ransom? It isn't their photos that are being ransomed but the threat of their valued (to them) internet contributions being trashed.

 

[Fred W]

I've mentioned before that I have previously been a happy subscriber to Photobucket. The subscription rate for the "Plus 20" plan that I was on was somewhere around $20 per year, as of my last renewal. It provided me plenty of image storage space, ad-free access to my account, and there was never a problem directly linking to the images. When I now look at my PB account online here is what I see:

Note that the "Plus 20" is not even an option anymore, so there will be no auto renewal when my plan expires. And none of the plans allow "3rd party hosting" until you get to the Plus 500 level. I'm not positive if what we do when we post direct links to photos for inline display on the forums is "linking" or "3rd Party Hosting".

Obviously they are still allowing me to link to images at least until my subscription runs out, as the above screen capture is linked from my PB account.

Edit: I found the following in one of their support menus:

What is 3rd Party Hosting?Photobucket defines 3rd party hosting as the action of embedding an image
or photo onto another website. For example, using the <img> tag to
embed or display a JPEG image from your Photobucket account on another
website such as a forum, auction listings, blog, etc.*

Do they really think anyone will be willing to pay $400 a year so they can link to photos in an online forum? They must be out of their minds.

 

[08FJR4ME]

I will repeat my last statement. They won't be in business for long.

Dave

 

[rogdeb]

Guess I got my RR report in just in time.

Got Photobucket e-mail this morning re their PLUS 500 plan.

Yeah, right !! NOT paying $39.99 per month.

 

[Uncle Hud]

rogdeb posted: Guess I got my RR report in just in time.

You might want to check that RR to see if your photos are displayed ..... JSNS.

 

[eflyguy]

rogdeb posted: Guess I got my RR report in just in time.

You might want to check that RR to see if your photos are displayed ..... JSNS.

Yeah.. there's no "just in time" - none of the pics in your report are visible. PB blocked any pics that were embedded (as you had done) regardless of when they were uploaded. I had stuff from ten years ago that was now blocked.

 

[Panman]

The worst part is how would you even begin to remember what posts you had posted pictures in? I guess mostly we live in today but still...............

 

[Fred W]

I guess you could do a search on your own content and decide which posts are important enough to re-create. This whole thing has forced me to go in and clean house in my photobucket account. I deleted a bunch of photos that won't be missed. That left me with over 500 ADVriders tag photos, a few thousand ride pictures, and several hundred technical pictures.

Some things are just not going to get re-linked. But, life will go on...

 

[dcarver]

I'm happy I host my own pix. Of course it costs more to do so than PB but at least I'm in charge of my own destiny.

 

[Fred W]

You are a master of your own domain?



Don't "throw it all away", Don!

 

[08FJR4ME]

Started setting up my IMGUR account and adding pic's. Not to bad, functionality is pretty good. Has a few adds but nothing like PB.

Dave

 

[Knifemaker]

Got the email from them today about upgrading for 3rd party hosting. Oddly, my earlier photos still remain on the forum.

See here:

https://www.fjrforum.com/forum//index.php/topic/154467-smokers-bbq-not-grilling/page-22

So, I'm not going to remove my photos from their site, even if they get around to blocking them here....if I'm taking up space there, I'm OK with that

 

[Northwoods Snowman]

The only reason I have a photo bucket account is to host images for forums. I don't store my photos on PB, I store them on my HD, and back that up on an external drive. I won't loose any photos, but like others have mentioned it will suck for anyone that wants to read and see the pics for any of my posts on any of the forums I'm on. Well, when you're house burns down, you have to pick up the pieces and start over. Guess I'll just have to start over with my forum pictures. There's no way I'm going to try to go back and try to figure out what pictures were linked in the first place so I can re-do them, lol.

I think PB has just shot themselves in the foot. I don't know what clientele they think is going to pay that kind of money to host freaking pictures, but what they have done is piss off probably most of their users and anyone who might have considered using them which will dry up their ad revenue.