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BYE BYE-Photobucket wants to charge $400/yr

JRExplorer3

.270 WIN
Looks like photobucket slammed the door on third party hosting unless you pay $400 a year.

The sight that advertised free storage and easy sharing.o_O

Photobucket even supplied you with the codes to do the 3rd party hosting and now, without any notice, the shut you down and want $$$$$$.

Got all my photos I didn't already have stored on my computer. Some of my pictures were posted from different computers, like ex G/F's, and are over 10 yrs old.

Some I had forgotten were stored and would have been unrecoverable if lost.

Bye Bye Photobucket. :dead:
 
Yeah, I'm going back through a lot of the different folders I had stored.

I am saving the important ones back to my (current) computer since I have no other copies of them.

I have noticed, after about the 10th one that I right click and save, I start getting page errors, then after the page reloads, start getting the errors every 3rd picture or so again.

I think that is intentional on their end to discourage it. But I'm going to finish it anyway.

All of my albums are private, though I could link them before their policy change.

I'm hearing on a lot of different forums, photobucket has created a mass exodus from their members by being so greedy.

Yes, I know it takes a lot of cost and storage on their end to run, but it's their business to destroy if they want to.
 
Backup Redundancy is what I was taught when I first joined the DoD...IBM 360 / 370 Mainframes all the way to Laptops and Server Farms (Clusters)...

Always backup on site and store gens off site.

Besides my Primary PB account...I had a secondary account on PB...Both now semi useless...as some forums I moderate have not had the PB photos affected. Yet.

Plus all the originals files to build them on my Laptop Hard Drive...plus an External Drive. Not to mention all the cards for my Canon Rebel XTi that took the pics.

Then built accounts on IMGUR and FLICKR...so, I'm Good to Go.

Adios Photo Bucket !!
 
I haven't put anything on Photobucket for years although I still have a thousand photos there. At some point one of my largest albums turned up with every photo mysteriously deleted by user.

I don't know if someone hacked my account or not but none of my other PB photos were affected.

There are probably a few there I will want to retrieve but all the important stuff is backed up elsewhere. What's going to happen is that old forums I used to attend, or which are currently in archive, will lose their photos.

But the whole thing is very smelly to me like some sort of an extortion racket. "You upgrade and pay us now or we will hold your linkage hostage forever."

I think they should have done something where they charged you a couple pennies each, and eventually they would have made a ton of money.

But what they're asking now is ridiculous.
 
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What what!?!?!?!?

WTF, first I've heard of this. Almost every forum pic I've posted in on PB.
 
What what!?!?!?!?

WTF, first I've heard of this. Almost every forum pic I've posted in on PB.

"On June 28 2017, Photobucket changed its Terms of Use regarding free accounts and 3rd party hosting(hosting on forums, ebay, etc). Only the most expensive plan, at $399.99 per year, now permits 3rd party hosting and linking to forums etc.

In one day Photobucket broke the picture links to billions of picture posted online.

Photobucket sent out no emails to warn users of this change. This resulted in millions of users being forced to ether pay up to restore links or find a new picture host.

Somewhere between 200 million to 1 billion picture links on forum and Twitter etc are broken and replaced with please update your account to enable 3rd party hosting picture."
 
I'm not paying it, even if the photos are never linked back to them ever again.

While I honestly tried to add a lot of photos and things to describe or to help explain whatever I was talking about, there will just have to be a bunch of dead links in my posts. That's their fault, not mine.

Besides, I'm looking at it as a blessing.

Kind of like those mysterious boat wrecks. :quote:
 
I don't use pb at all.
I have an imgur account but they banned me for posting up a photo of a chick in a bikini. Wtf...theres tons of em all over there. But whatever...
I do have a googlephotos account, I need to download a bunch of em from there...just in case.
Here and on woodbarter, I post directly to the site.
 
Their site is so hosed I cannot even get to my libraries to offload the pics I have stored there.

I've had problems with them on and off for years but just never managed to completely switch over to someone else.
 
One of the problems with Photobucket is it automatically tries to link to Facebook and upload my photos from Facebook to Photobucket. I have a Facebook account with the same name.

I haven't used that account in years and in fact I asked Facebook to delete it immediately after it was made because there was an error in the initial construction that could not be corrected. They refused to delete the account and let me start over.

I refuse to use their service, because that's when I understood that Facebook is all about stealing your data and they never want to let it go or let you go. To me this is an invasion of my privacy but evidently I signed on to allow it when I clicked okay. Eventually this will piss off some guy so much that he will burn Facebook down. Fortunately that guy will never be me.

Anyhow when I log on to Photobucket it sits there forever trying to import photos from a Facebook account that is suspended (yet not deleted) which causes the system just to sit there in an infinite Loop.

I managed to go there and download one photograph that I wanted, and as far as I'm concerned the rest of them can all be deleted. I will never use Photobucket or Facebook ever again.
 
Wow, that's huge news. I haven't accessed mine in some time until just recently. I only use it from the app on my phone and in reality, it was already difficult to navigate and use. But, I kept it because I have stuff on there that I've lost access to due to an old laptop no longer being functional.

I just got on there to check it out and the first photo I clicked on came up with a screen telling me I had to sign up or log in. I logged in and it's as if I had never been on there. Like I started a new account. I don't even know where my old pictures are now. I'll mess with it more later.

I do now use, and have for the last couple years, used redundant back up plans. IDrive is free, but I pay .99 cents a year for 50 gig storage, I also use my apple plan and Amazon prime. Amazon prime is unlimited and it's either 5 or 6 devices. IDrive, while free up to a point, is kinda slow but it works.

The only trouble is that I can't share from these sources.
 
Well, this is a shock. I have been using Photobucket off and on for over 10 years. Paying $400 a year is complete bull just to be able to share some images. I'm not sad to leave Photobucket. They can take their $400 plan and shove it. I happily just deleted my account with them. I always wondered if they would ever become a pay service. I used to use Imageshack. Once upon a time they were free, but those days are long over.
 
I have finished downloading the pics I wanted and have deleted my account (Which takes 48 hours.)
 
At some point during a business meeting, someone is going to ask how many paying accounts have we gained, and how many accounts have we lost.

There may be some soul-searching after the fact, but I doubt it. Most of the deleted accounts are going to be free accounts, which to be honest is still going to cost them money by advertisers in the end, so I hope photobucket chokes on it.
 
Can you really delete an account or is it like Facebook where they hold on to your personal data forever?

I believe that the free Photobucket application was supposed to make money for them through the fact that people would order prints and posters and other artwork of their photographs for which they would pay.

Unfortunately with the economy in the toilet nobody's doing that stuff.

Right now I pay $6 a month to host 50,000 page views on Proboards. They host images there for free and I only pay the $6 a month so I don't have to look at ads. With storage space so inexpensive nowadays and so much bandwidth available, I can't imagine a business model where someone would pay $400 a year.
 
At some point during a business meeting, someone is going to ask how many paying accounts have we gained, and how many accounts have we lost.

There may be some soul-searching after the fact, but I doubt it. Most of the deleted accounts are going to be free accounts, which to be honest is still going to cost them money by advertisers in the end, so I hope photobucket chokes on it.


They could easily have just charged $10, $20 or probably even $50 a year, and people would have happily paid it to keep things going smoothly. They still would take in millions if not billions given the number of people using PB as purely a 3rd party host (which I have to believe is a majority of their users). The quick jump to $400 with no warning is ridiculous.
 
Can you really delete an account or is it like Facebook where they hold on to your personal data forever?

I believe that the free Photobucket application was supposed to make money for them through the fact that people would order prints and posters and other artwork of their photographs for which they would pay.

Unfortunately with the economy in the toilet nobody's doing that stuff.

Right now I pay $6 a month to host 50,000 page views on Proboards. They host images there for free and I only pay the $6 a month so I don't have to look at ads. With storage space so inexpensive nowadays and so much bandwidth available, I can't imagine a business model where someone would pay $400 a year.


Nothing posted online ever truly goes away. They will no longer make the account visible but it may still be cached, stored in backups, etc. For liability reasons I do not think any of these companies ever truly wipe out anything any more.
 
I don't think it has anything to do with liability because if you read their fine print they disclaim liability for anything and everything, and you agree to that when you sign up.

I think it's all about data mining, as the larger their database is, the more profitable their data mining will be.
 
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