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Photobucket News

Posted: Tue Jul 04, 2017 8:26 pm
by Atomic
Denver-based Photobucket is now seeking a $399 (£309) annual fee from those who wish to continue using it for "third-party hosting" and is facing a social media backlash as a consequence. (from BBC.com)

It seems those who use Photobucket for their Amazon / E-Bay / Etsy / social media photo hosting are now just displaying a PB placeholder.

So, $400 a year for their service, or $40 a year for a dedicated server, or just use your ISP's web host function (if they have one).

Remember, The Cloud is owned and run by someone else, not you. You just get to use their storage until they decide otherwise!

Re: Photobucket News

Posted: Tue Jul 04, 2017 8:45 pm
by Alkarii
Yeah, Photobucket's been hanging by a thread for a while, apparently. Still, something like this s pretty much business suicide. Why pay $400/year for something you can do for free with a site like Imgur? Granted, they're ad supported, but they're also adblock friendly.

Re: Photobucket News

Posted: Tue Jul 04, 2017 10:16 pm
by lake_wrangler
I was going to test it here, and the preview worked, but I don't know if once I post it, it will trigger something... And I just read the new terms of service, and it says that once it determines that you need to upgrade, you can't access ANY of your photos until you pay!

So I won't test it, after all... Just in case...

Can anyone recommend another (free) service instead? Or is one better off sharing from their cloud storage services (whether Dropbox, Google drive, or whatever)?

Re: Photobucket News

Posted: Tue Jul 04, 2017 11:36 pm
by Alkarii
Well, it's a good thing all the pictures I uploaded on PB are still on the hard drive to our old computer or my old phone.

Re: Photobucket News

Posted: Wed Jul 05, 2017 12:08 am
by AnotherFairportfan
lake_wrangler wrote:I was going to test it here, and the preview worked, but I don't know if once I post it, it will trigger something... And I just read the new terms of service, and it says that once it determines that you need to upgrade, you can't access ANY of your photos until you pay!

So I won't test it, after all... Just in case...

Can anyone recommend another (free) service instead? Or is one better off sharing from their cloud storage services (whether Dropbox, Google drive, or whatever)?
I pay $6.99/month for hosting for electronictiger.net, and that's where my photos to share go.

Re: Photobucket News

Posted: Wed Jul 05, 2017 11:59 pm
by Atomic
FWIW, I have my own website through Dream Host (boo, hiss GoDaddy) and put shared photos in their own sub directory. Their web structure and FireFTP let me drag the entire site (and pics) into a local backup on one step - drag and drop. Then comes the monthly backup to a 1TB external drive for Belt-and-Suspenders protection.

A few months back, my Win7 box came down with the Auto Update Failure thing that was going around. One full install later, I was back in business in less than an hour from the external drive. If my Dream Host site had been borked, it would have only been about 20 minutes to replace it all.

Blessed are the pessimists, for they shall have made backups! (and practice using them!)

Re: Photobucket News

Posted: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:17 pm
by Alkarii
So, does anyone want to place bets on how long this is going to last? I have a feeling they'll go under from lack of use, and probably aren't smart enough to stop what they're doing and go back to what they had been doing before.

Re: Photobucket News

Posted: Fri Jul 14, 2017 8:34 pm
by Warrl
Alkarii wrote:So, does anyone want to place bets on how long this is going to last? I have a feeling they'll go under from lack of use, and probably aren't smart enough to stop what they're doing and go back to what they had been doing before.
Going back probably wouldn't help - a lot of people have already made other arrangements and moved their stuff over, and have no reason to abandon their new image-hosting site.

Tapas (company that owns http://tapastic.com among other urls) made an error of similar kind recently: they changed their terms of service to give themselves "right of first refusal" on deals to commercialize work posted to their site (which would mean that if you made a deal to sell your work that you had previously posted there, Tapas would have the right to step in and become the buyer.) This violated the sensibilities of enough people that - even though the change never actually took effect and was rescinded within a few days - quite a lot of people actually went to the bother of REMOVING stuff from their servers and making it available elsewhere.

(I read a couple webcomics that were hosted there; imho it's one of the worst shared websites for hosting independently-produced webcomics, only marginally better than Patreon.)

You might wonder why "right of first refusal" is a big deal. There are several pretty simple reasons.

One is objective and quite practical: negotiating to buy intellectual-property rights is not a no-cost activity. At a minimum it consumes time. Suppose you know that if you negotiate to buy someone's IP, and you negotiate a good deal, someone else is going to jump in front of you and buy it WITHOUT paying the cost of negotiating the deal. Are you going to be eager to put in the effort? Thus, IP subject to a "right of first refusal" is significantly less desirable than might be the case without that provision - and the less you offer to pay for some IP, the more likely that the other party will buy it away from you.

Another is subjective and somewhat emotion-driven. As a creator of art, you want your work respected, suitably marketed, et cetera. You arrange to sell some of the rights to it to a company that you trust to do a good job based on their track record... then this other company with no track record says "hey, we have a contractual right to buy it"...

And a third, also subjective and emotion-driven, is simply a matter of an attitude of "who owns this?". Maybe, possibly, Tapas can address all those issues - but it still remains that they tired to take control of who would buy their users' intellectual property. That, ultimately and to a certain degree, an internet hosting company - not the artist - would decide who gets to take the artist's work to another market.

Re: Photobucket News

Posted: Sat Jul 15, 2017 3:31 am
by Alkarii
Yeah, they pretty much just killed their own business with this. Of course, I had heard that Photobucket was filled with malicious ads and scams.

I just wish they'd let people have their files back.

Re: Photobucket News

Posted: Sat Jul 15, 2017 8:22 am
by TazManiac
I popped in last night and Downloaded my 'Library' from them. Looks like I'd only ever posted up 70 pictures in total.

Re: Photobucket News

Posted: Sun Jul 16, 2017 3:32 pm
by GlytchMeister
For those looking for a free replacement, you might try deviantART. It has paid versions but the free features let you upload pictures and link to them.

Re: Photobucket News

Posted: Sun Jul 16, 2017 4:18 pm
by Alkarii
I'll have to look into that, then. Apparently, I can still see my pictures if I log in, so I can probably get all my stuff off of it.

Re: Photobucket News

Posted: Sun Jul 16, 2017 8:56 pm
by lake_wrangler
GlytchMeister wrote:For those looking for a free replacement, you might try deviantART. It has paid versions but the free features let you upload pictures and link to them.
Interesting... I have a DeviantArt account, but never uploaded pics to it. No drawings, either, even though I have drawn several, over the years, which I had uploaded to the College Roomies From Hell!!! (the exclamation points stand for quality!).

Maybe it's time I reconsider...
*Goes off to try to login to account...*
Of course, it would help if I could remember my credentials... I didn't even save them to LastPass...
*Goes through procedure for forgotten user name*
*goes through procedure for forgotten password reset*
There: now I'm in.


It's so empty, in there... I'll just have to upload stuff... later...

Re: Photobucket News

Posted: Mon Jul 17, 2017 4:07 am
by Atomic
Does Flickr still work? I've had some stuff linked from there, but I haven't looked at it lately -- the target links that is... Don't remember most of them.

Re: Photobucket News

Posted: Mon Jul 17, 2017 12:19 pm
by lake_wrangler
Speaking of DevantArt, does anyone know what their limits are? I tried looking around a little, to see if they had limits on how many pics/images you were allowed to upload, or whether they had a size limit, but I couldn't find anything quickly enough, so I had to bail for now...

Re: Photobucket News

Posted: Mon Jul 17, 2017 12:27 pm
by Atomic
As a DA user, I've seen accounts with multiple hundreds of images posted. YMMV!

Re: Photobucket News

Posted: Mon Jul 17, 2017 9:28 pm
by AmriloJim
Only time I tried uploading to my DeviantArt was an animated gif (1280x1552)... I took a 1923 image of an Amarillo moviehouse and lit the arms and legs of what were oviously stick figures on the rooftop sign. It wouldn't save. Would up hosting it on my own server: http://image66amarillo.com/personal/192 ... i_1280.gif.

Re: Photobucket News

Posted: Wed Aug 30, 2017 12:21 pm
by TazManiac
Soooo... Has anyone reached any kind of solid recommendation as to picture hosting?

(I have a DeviantArt account around here somewhere, but I'd only ever used it to verify my Adult Status...)

Re: Photobucket News

Posted: Thu Aug 31, 2017 12:33 am
by Atomic
You have a web account -- have you considered using your web hosting function if they have one? This assumes you're not hosting stuff you expecting to be seen a gazillion times, just a few buncha hits each.

Re: Photobucket News

Posted: Thu Aug 31, 2017 2:07 am
by AnotherFairportfan
Atomic wrote:You have a web account -- have you considered using your web hosting function if they have one? This assumes you're not hosting stuff you expecting to be seen a gazillion times, just a few buncha hits each.
I use my web-hosting account to post pictures too big for the board's "Attachment" function to accept.