Time to dump Photobucket.

[Kobuk]

A few days ago, all my pictures were fine and were showing up on various model kit building forums. But now, things have changed, and not in a good way. Just recently, I've noticed a lot of my pictures have been replaced by the following:
http://photobucket.com/p500/   
Apparently, PB has changed their Terms of Service and a lot of people aren't happy about it as described here:
http://blog.photobucket.com/status/comment-page-1/

I am not happy about upgrading to a Plus 500 plan nor will I give PB money.     Therefore, I finally decided to delete my PB account. I am sorry to say that all my pictures from various model threads are now gone. Whether I will refix all my threads at various model forums with having the pictures on a new photo hosting service is unknown at this time.

This post isn't just about what happened to me, but I also wanted to warn others too about what is happening at Photobucket and what could potentially happen to your accounts as well.

[cause the rat]

Bummer dude. Really sucks that your stuff is no longer displayed. After reading through PB costumer complaints i'm gad  your smart enough not to fall for their scams. Really hope your able to find a new way to get your photos back on sites.

I have a simple account that hasn't been used in a few years. Almost all the sites I belong to allow me to upload images from my computer.  I'd say drop PB and get your own web site. For $8 a month you get 100GB. For between $16 to $20  a month you get unlimited band with and storage. Check out Go Daddy. It's not free. But from what I've read following your links PB isn't free anymore either. And PB doesn't seem to mind pulling their paying costumers though the mud.

[Loc]

Why get your own site? Plenty of free image hosting places still around. Photobucket has always been the worst choice of the lot, with slow load times and ads. There's a reason imgur has been the main image hosting site for a while now :p

[Old Rabbit]

That's why I got a domain years ago. Seemed everytime I had things
working the web page provider would change the URL or some other
rule. Then I had to redo my site pictures and all.

Might check out Go Daddy. They have some pretty good deals on domains
and hosting them. I don't know if Facebook alows hot links or not, but there
are probably a few hosting sites still around.

[Kobuk]

I started a free PB account long ago back in 2003 or so. But as the years wore on, I got more and more frustrated with PB's storage limits, ads, and so much more. I will never go back to using them again. 

I started a secondary photo account on Flickr a few years ago. It's a free account as well with a 1000GB storage limit. That should be plenty of storage for what I've got. Guess I'll have to put everything there.

Imageshack is no better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageShack

Although ImageShack previously had a subscription service, the majority of its revenue was produced from advertising related to its free image hosting. In January 2014, ImageShack announced that it was switching to a subscription based service and would no longer offer free uploads.

Images stored in free accounts were still available until January 31, 2016, and free accounts not converted to paid accounts were deleted after that date. The new website interface does not allow direct free web-based access to the original image resolution, but images can be bulk-downloaded at original resolution using their SkyPath application.

*sigh*     Gone are the days of free accounts, free uploading, etc. Now the only thing photo hosting sites care about is making money off of people's photos and they don't care how they do it. 

[Keitsu]

I use flickr for image hosting. You just have to know how to get the url of the images for the size you want.

This is how I get the url of a flickr image with firefox:
download > view all sizes > pick size > right-click image > inspect element > copy url

[Kobuk]

What worries me next is that I have a second PB account that I use for mainly furry photos only (Convention pics, fursuit tutorials, etc.).  God only knows when PB will get tough on that account too and I'll be forced to move everything from that account or delete it. So far, I haven't recieved any emails or notices about it.

EDIT: I stand corrected. I just looked at my 2nd PB account and PB has gotten tough on that too. 


PB's pricing plans:
http://photobucket.com/pricing

No sense using PB anymore when instead you can get a free account at Flickr with 1 Terabyte (1000GB) of storage.

[Kobuk]

I've just been to a bunch of model kit websites and forums that I generally go to as well as some other places in the last hour. The news is not good. People are pissed about what Photobucket has done. Millions of pictures gone. Thousands or millions of forums, websites, blogs, etc., etc. affected. Basically, what PB is trying to do is force people to pay their most expensive plan at $400/year in order for what they call 3rd Party Hosting. Their Plus50 and Plus100 plans do not offer 3rd Party Hosting.
http://photobucket.com/pricing
http://photobucket.com/p500/
So if you have a PB account and want your pictures to show up here on Furtopia or elsewhere, you either pay the $400/year or you're screwed.
In short, it's corporate greed. Pure and simple.  And I wouldn't be too surprised if Trump and his cronies had a hand in all this. He's been trying to roll back FCC rules, Net Neutrality, etc. and give big breaks to all his telecommunications friends.

[Storm Fox]

Now, now, photobucket just wants to insure their future.
After all, bandwidth cost money and they have over 100,000,000 users, that's got to cost a lot.


...And $399 seems like a lot to some but I guess it's not so much broken down monthly, I imagine it takes a lot to fund a website with nearly 2,000,000 users.


...of course since photobucket is a small site with only 15,000 users now, perhaps they can lower the price a bit........

Hmm photobucket.com is available, I could buy the domain and start my own... hey look, imgur... those silly cats.

[Kobuk]

There's a few lessons that can be learned from this whole Photobucket experience:

1. Nothing is ever free in life. People will always find a way to charge money for something.
2. He who has all the gold makes all the rules.
3. Knowledge is power. And those who control knowledge (Text, books, photos, etc.) have all the power.

[Kobuk]

A few articles and other information about photo image hosting sites.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/354711/photobucket-breaks-image-links-across-the-internet

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/30/photobucket_charging_400yr_3rdparty_pgs/

https://petapixel.com/2017/07/01/photobucket-just-broke-billions-photos-embedded-web/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/40492668

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjNFjZglm_A

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_image-sharing_websites

Article from May 17, 2017.
https://www.thebalance.com/top-free-image-hosting-websites-1357014

[Kaiden]

Don't most people use Facebook nowadays?
Why not host images on there? There's also FA if it's a furry image.

[Kobuk]

Don't most people use Facebook nowadays?
Why not host images on there? There's also FA if it's a furry image.

Facebook is not a true dedicated photo image hosting site. It doesn't have a lot of photo tools (Editing, sharing, etc.) that other sites like Imgur, Flickr, and others have. And if people have their Facebook accounts, posts, and photo albums set to Private, then you can't see them, especially if you're a non-Facebook person.

FA might be ok for furry type images. But again, it's not a true photo hosting site and doesn't have a lot of features that other true photo hosting sites have.

[Kaiden]

Don't most people use Facebook nowadays?
Why not host images on there? There's also FA if it's a furry image.

Facebook is not a true dedicated photo image hosting site. It doesn't have a lot of photo tools (Editing, sharing, etc.) that other sites like Imgur, Flickr, and others have. And if people have their Facebook accounts, posts, and photo albums set to Private, then you can't see them, especially if you're a non-Facebook person.

FA might be ok for furry type images. But again, it's not a true photo hosting site and doesn't have a lot of features that other true photo hosting sites have.

So image editing software and privacy options make or break an image host?

An image is just a file,  you could literally get a free sub domain from freedns and use a free web host to host your images, as well as using gimp or other online photo editing sites. 

[Kobuk]

So image editing software and privacy options make or break an image host?

Pretty much. Each image hosting service (Imgur, Imageshack, Photobucket, Flickr, etc.) will be at least 80% or more similar to each other in terms of services and tools they have. But the other 20% or so will be different. It's up to the user to compare each service and find out what is good vs. what isn't, etc.

An image is just a file,  you could literally get a free sub domain from freedns and use a free web host to host your images, as well as using gimp or other online photo editing sites. 

Perhaps. But many people may not want to create a domain and host images on it when there already is free (or supposedly free) image hosting sites on the Net already for people to use and store their photos.

[Loc]

People like convenience. Being able to edit the pictures in the same place you upload them appeals for this reason. And generally, image hosting sites have fairly simple to use editors with little to no learning curve, which can be used with little effort on most devices.

[Rocket T. Coyote]

I have a PB account, but hardly use it anymore. What about Picasa or Smugmug?