37 replies to this topic

[mhbell]

Went to post some pictures in EMail and on a Forum. Photo Bucket refused to let me post links to the pictures. They want money. Here is what they say about 3rd party hosting. It is no longer Free.

*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 listing, blog, etc. is definitively 3rd party hosting.

   Photo Bucket  Competitive, fixed pricing Offers the only unlimited 3rd party hosting plan (Commercial and Personal Use)

Are my pictures still safe?

Yes! All your photos are still available by logging into your Photobucket Account.
  
Can I download my Photos?

Absolutely, at any time. It is an easy four step process:

Step 1. Login to your Photobucket Account

Step 2. Navigate to your library page

Step 3. View a photo and click the download button

Step 4. The picture will be saved to your computer

Edited by mhbell, 12 July 2017 - 06:55 PM.

[ebrke]

Hmm--maybe move to Imgur? Hope they'll stay free.

[securitybreach]

And that is why people no longer use Photobucket (among other reasons).

[mhbell]

ebrke, on 12 July 2017 - 06:33 PM, said:

Hmm--maybe move to Imgur? Hope they'll stay free.

I just tried Imgur and it works great so far. had to use drag and drop to upload, but no big deal.
Mel

[mhbell]

securitybreach, on 12 July 2017 - 07:04 PM, said:

And that is why people no longer use Photobucket (among other reasons).

I can see why. I did not see this coming and had no advance Warning. I will download all of the pictures that I posted on their site. Will transfer them to Imgur as long as it stays free.
Mel

[securitybreach]

mhbell, on 12 July 2017 - 07:22 PM, said:

ebrke, on 12 July 2017 - 06:33 PM, said:

Hmm--maybe move to Imgur? Hope they'll stay free.

I just tried Imgur and it works great so far. had to use drag and drop to upload, but no big deal.
Mel

You can easily just click New Post and then Browse to select your image from your directory:

[securitybreach]

mhbell, on 12 July 2017 - 07:24 PM, said:

securitybreach, on 12 July 2017 - 07:04 PM, said:

And that is why people no longer use Photobucket (among other reasons).

I can see why. I did not see this coming and had no advance Warning. I will download all of the pictures that I posted on their site. Will transfer them to Imgur as long as it stays free.
Mel

Imgur has and will always be free. They generate enough money being the most popular image hosting site on the internet from hits. Basically a large percentage of all images hosted on the net come from imgur. Every meme, every photo, etc. that circulates the web was probably hosted on imgur as it is the number one hosting spot for reddit, 4chat, twitter, etc.

[sunrat]

securitybreach, on 12 July 2017 - 08:06 PM, said:

Every meme, every photo, etc. that circulates the web was probably hosted on imgur as it is the number one hosting spot for reddit, 4chat, twitter, etc.

I use Imgur too, but this worries me a little. Will they be like Google and Facebook and slowly change their TOS to become just another data mining company? Maybe they are some of the way there already.

[securitybreach]

sunrat, on 12 July 2017 - 08:43 PM, said:

securitybreach, on 12 July 2017 - 08:06 PM, said:

Every meme, every photo, etc. that circulates the web was probably hosted on imgur as it is the number one hosting spot for reddit, 4chat, twitter, etc.

I use Imgur too, but this worries me a little. Will they be like Google and Facebook and slowly change their TOS to become just another data mining company? Maybe they are some of the way there already.

Well they have been around since 2008 and have not sold out yet.

Quote

Designed to be a gift to the online community of Reddit,it took off almost instantly, jumping from a thousand hits per day to a million total page views in the first five months.Imgur became widely recognized following its rise to popularity on social media websites such as Facebook, Reddit, and Digg.In October 2012, Imgur expanded its functionality to allow users to directly share images to Imgur instead of requiring images to gain enough attraction through other social media sites like Reddit to show up on the popular image gallery,

In the beginning, Imgur relied on donations to help with the web hosting costs. As the site grew, it needed additional sources of revenue to keep up with demand. Display ads were introduced in May 2009; sponsored images and self-service ads were introduced in 2013.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imgur

[securitybreach]

Also, this is interesting:

Quote

In 2013, Imgur overtook other image hosts in interest, such as Photobucket, ImageShack, and TinyPic, according to Google Trends. As of April 2016, it is ranked 16th among Alexa's Top Sites in the United States.

In its first month, Imgur had 93,000 page views. According to EdgeCast in 2012, Imgur's former content delivery network (CDN), Imgur served more images in 10 minutes than there are in the entire Library of Congress. In 2012, there were 300 million images uploaded, 364 billion image views counted, and 42 petabytes of data transferred.

And that was 2012. I couldn't imagine what their stats are now.

[raymac46]

I have a paid subscription with Photobucket  - not nearly good enough to support links let alone 3rd party hosting. I have been using it to host my blog photos so I have some work to do now to host the photos on my own site I guess. I have until the end of the year to get this fixed apparently. Thanks Photobucket...NOT!!!!

[V.T. Eric Layton]

I contacted Imgur one time to ask them how I could donate some $$$ to them for their great service. They thanked me, but said there was no means to make payments or donations to Imgur. They are a FREE service. I was impressed with their response.

About PhotoSuckit... I received an email from them about that "3rd Party" warning baloney. Unfortunately, many of the images, emoticons, etc. on my private board are served at PB. I s'pose I'll be setting up an Imgur account just for my forum and uploading those images to them. Unfortunately, it's going to be a lot of work. It's not going to be a priority in my life right now, though.

[securitybreach]

I could see how that may create a lot of work for those that used their service. Very unethical on their part..

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Seems to me that the whole purpose of image server sites is to allow you to SERVE images you store there on other sites? When did this change? What the HECK use to me is an image site that only allows you to view the images you've stored on their site? I can store the darn things on my system for that. Senseless. I don't expect PhotoRipoff to be a viable service for much longer. This reminds me of the same do-do happening at ImageShack a few years back; which drove me to PhotoBucket, by the way.

[securitybreach]

V.T. Eric Layton, on 13 July 2017 - 01:29 PM, said:

Seems to me that the whole purpose of image server sites is to allow you to SERVE images you store there on other sites? When did this change? What the HECK use to me is an image site that only allows you to view the images you've stored on their site? I can store the darn things on my system for that. Senseless. I don't expect PhotoRipoff to be a viable service for much longer. This reminds me of the same do-do happening at ImageShack a few years back; which drove me to PhotoBucket, by the way.

That is the whole purpose of them. I do not understand their decision either.

[raymac46]

Well I think kinda, sorta good news. Since I had a Plus account at Photobucket they'll give me until the end of 2018 to move my photos. The 3rd party hosting will still work until then. I'll be hosting my own stuff once I get all my blog posts fixed.
This sucks. I did pay and didn't abuse their system with a lot of eBay/Amazon sale items.

[mhbell]

Got a email today from Photo Bucket trying to sell me stuff (merchandise) from their online store. Here is a link and a excerpt from the email.
Mel

Quote

Photobucket is excited to bring you, PBDeals, a website that offers unique, hand-selected products at amazing prices that we are sure you will love. It's just another way for us to show our appreciation for your continued support of Photobucket! CLICK HERE

[securitybreach]

Wow

[mhbell]

I just Finished downloading all of my albums and photos from photo bucket. Then I deleted all of them on their site and canceled (Deleted) my account. I also told them the reason why. unsubscribed from all of their emails too. I have no use for a company like them.
Mel

[securitybreach]

Nice

[raymac46]

I signed up for Imgur but I don't really trust them either. They are ad supported and do a lot of data mining. No way to pay to turn the ads off so you have to use an adblocker.
I'm going to move my critical photos over to my own site. It might be slower but there are no bandwidth and storage capacity limits.
Photobucket hasn't got a way to make money from all the folks who embed photos elsewhere so they have tried extortion. At least they'll get rid of their problem that way.



This is a photo off my own site.

Edited by raymac46, 14 July 2017 - 07:39 AM.

[raymac46]

Wow! Must be a lot of people wanting to download. It took me a couple of days before I was able to get my zip file of Photobucket images, but I have it now so I can work from that to restore my blog.
Not to rain on anyone's parade here, but it states quite clearly in the Imgur TOS that they do NOT want you to embed stuff on other sites. So I wouldn't say that Imgur is a good alternative for me.
My own website is best, and if I were fool enough to try another 3rd party site a brief search shows me that (wait for it) Image Shack might work. Low cost and it says right in the feature list that embedding is OK.

Edited by raymac46, 14 July 2017 - 12:21 PM.

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Stay away from ImageShack. They were my first image server way back when. Urmas actually turned me onto them. However, they went the way of Photobucket... very slow servers, more and more restrictions, begging for money, etc.

Imgur has ads? I've never seen one. I haven't seen an ad in about a decade on any website. Why would anyone NOT run and adblocker?

[zlim]

I went through 2 sites that I liked. I used Walagata paid ($9.99) for many years but I ended up getting locked out, even though I paid up for a year about 3 - 4 weeks before the year was up. I got my money refunded after I complained to PayPal.

Next I used ImageBam, free. I liked them but they said they were going down on June 30th. So I grabbed everything and I keep it archived on 2 computers and probably on a USB stick.

Someone posted an image from ImageBam yesterday. I went to the site and was able to login and upload a picture. (You can also upload without logging in).



Do I trust them again? I don't know.

In the meantime, I've been using https://postimages.org/

Edited by zlim, 14 July 2017 - 02:39 PM.

[sunrat]

Looks like Postimage discourages hot linking. From their TOS:

Quote

Please keep the images embedded into third-party websites wrapped in links back to the corresponding HTML pages at our site when possible. The outgoing link should lead the user directly to our web page without any interstitial pages or interruptions.

Although "when possible" is rather vague.

https://imgbox.com/ looks promising. rejean posted an image from there in another thread.