I'm sure everyone is now well aware of what Photobucket did - charging $400/year if you want to link your photos to a 3rd party site, like this one. Not only has it affected decades worth of forum threads all over the world, but there are/were a large number of Ebay, Amazon and Etsy sellers who posted images of the goods they were selling on these sites from PB too, and all of those images are gone as well......so not only have they disrupted their own site, but millions of sites all around the world - it's a real mess. Some forums are concerned not only at the loss of historical date and expertise, but that their forum may simply die because of the PB debacle. Many are rushing to other hosts such as Imgur and Flickr and others, but I fear that's only a stopgap, and if PB's ransomware approach works because folks simply can't recreate their threads, other hosting sites may do something similar. This has been a concern of mine every since the "cloud" became a thing.....you put all of you important pics and papers up there, and then how do you keep them from doing something like this? At what point do you just decide to pay the fee as it's almost impossible to recreate what you already did on another site? BTW, Facebook is not the answer, while the images do remain on your page, ones you have linked will soon disappear from places you've shared them and you'll have to do what PB users are doing, recreate threads with photos hosted somewhere else, or simply let those threads die. So, what are some of you going to do with your photo accounts?
Yeah, it definitely sucks! No notice at all, and then you find out they're going to extort you for four bills per annum to use the hosting service. They will tell you that they're still allowing you to store photos on the site, but BFD! I have hard drives for that. If they had given a little notice and charged something like $5.99 a month I might have gone for it, but now? I say F***-em.
I used to hotlink things from PB. Nothing there I can't lose so it is not a big deal to me, but it is a major pain to other's. How long did people think they'd have a free ride? About a month ago a message appeared telling me to turn off my ad block in order to use PB. I did & received an avalanche of so many pop ups that it made PB unusable. Yep the handwriting was on the wall. The way they have gone about this is really poor. They gave people no time to get their ducks in a row. Now if you want to use those hot links it's $399 or lose them. Worse yet if anyone is using PB to store their pictures oh man are they in trouble. As far as Flickr & Imgur go this very same thing could very well haven there too. I've used smugmug for a number of years now. It costs me $3.99 a month for the basic plan that does everything I need. Here is a coupon code gVhOoc1hjCn5Q that will save you $5.00 if you decide to use them. https://www.smugmug.com/ Whatever you decide to do make sure your pictures are kept in a safe place & backed up in 3 places.
What's to say Smugmug wont follow in PB's footsteps? My understanding is your photos are still there on PB and you can certainly download them back to your computer and then re-upload them to another host, but that won't recreate anything you've posted and linked to PB before. There are millions of forums out there covering every possible hobby in the world, and they all rely on pics to help document people's work or knowledge......all lost now. It's a terrible thing to do this to their loyal customers.
There are no guaranties in life. Yes smugmug could go belly up, but they have a good business model that works for them & has for years. PB was stupid, they gave it away for so long & got to the point where they'd have to close with so little income & all the folks taking advantage of that free storage. Yes many millions of broken links & that's a shame. A months warning would have been great. $399 a year is crazy. ut: One more thing they are not loyal customers. They are-were people taking advantage of a huge free loophole that has now closed. Only to be reopened with a large amount of $$$.
Not sure if this is of any interest, but it does work. For how long until they say pay up is anyones guess. PostImage.org
More PB stuff..... https://petapixel.com/2017/07/01/photobucket-just-broke-billions-photos-embedded-web/
This may be a stupid question (probably) but how much would it cost and how hard would it be to set up a private hosting site? Anyone know how much the software would be? Is there much maintenance involved? I'm not talking about a commercial site that is marketed to the public, just something that is small and private, with the members sharing the expenses. As far as I am concerned, I am a computer dummy, but I would volunteer to be treasurer to keep the money straight. Many years ago, I volunteered to be a treasurer...and WWW.type2.com was born, in pretty much the same way. Tell me how dumb I am ....
Do you have to wade through an avalanche of pop up adds to use it? My account is still there, but it is a painful site to use now. I'll use a more painless hot- linking site now.
Me too, I wouldn't mind paying for the service, I actually did pay annually because of the amount of storage I was using, but they upped the limit on the free account and it was no longer necessary to have a pay account. Problem is, they aren't offering 3rd party hosting in anything but the Top Tier account ($399.00 annually) if they would have offered it in their lower tier accounts, I would stay with them. But honestly, after this, I'm pulling everything and looking for another solution, with the way this went down, I'd be surprised if they even last out the year as a company, at this point even if they changed their policy, this left such a bad taste in people's mouths, most will never use them again. Everyone that uses them, just needs to be prepared for the site to disappear without a trace.
It looks like it still works for me. I just logged into PB Selected a photo. Copied the IMG tag and pasted it here. :ihih:
After many minutes of examination.... I think it's just a badly adjusted strap on one side.... But I want to be sure, so further examination will be required....