Photobucket change re: 3rd party hosting

[watcher652]

I stored photos on Photobucket.com and then used a link to the photo to post pictures to Gateworld forums and other sites. Now that service is no longer free. In June 2017, Photobucket changed its terms of service. You now have to pay $400 a year to allow this 3rd party hosting.

Yes, that's right. From Free to $400 a year.

You do get 500 GB of storage instead of the free 2 GB, but since I only use 7% of my 2 GB now, what do I need with 500 GB? And I certainly don't have $400 a year for this.

edit: I'm not sure, but maybe I'm not embedding my photos. I may be linking to them. In that case, the cost is $100 a year. But still!

No matter what I do, all the photos I've posted here, and all the other sites I've posted photos, are now unavailable since all the links are now invalid. Ugh! Or maybe they links are still valid if I want to pay $400 a year.

I've been using Photobucket to post photos since 2004. That's a lot of missing photos.

What do other folks do to post photos? I won't be able to fix the old photo links, but I still want to continue posting photos to sites.

[Who Knows]

I switched to Imgur about 3 or 4 weeks back when they caught up with me.
You can still get your photos of Photobucket and store them on your PC then upload them to your new host site.
I had mine in albums & you can get a whole album at once. Go to their site & check it out.

[watcher652]

I switched to Imgur about 3 or 4 weeks back when they caught up with me.
You can still get your photos of Photobucket and store them on your PC then upload them to your new host site.

I had mine in albums & you can get a whole album at once. Go to their site & check it out.

I have mine in albums, too, but Download Album seems to be broken. Searching the 'net, someone commented that it hasn't worked for them for over a week. Photobucket (PB) says that it may take a while to download an album with many images, but I tried downloading an album with just one photo and it never worked and I gave it a long time. The captcha expired before it downloaded the album. If everyone is frantically trying to save their photos, maybe PB disabled the function, or their servers are just overwhelmed.

What's really sad is all the history that has been lost. A lot of forums don't let you update an old post, especially if the topic is closed.

Whole websites are now broken. Amazon, eBay and Etsy users have to find another host to show their goods. Technical help forums with users helping users now have incomplete information. Not only do people have to find a new place to host their photos, videos and gifs, they have to re-code their web pages with the new links.

What a mess!

[watcher652]

Looks like there's a hack you can use if your photos are on Photobucket and are no longer displaying.

If you change .jpg to .jpg~original in the Photobucket URL, the image appears.

I edited some previous posts and it looks like it works. Who knows when this will stop working, though.


According to some posts I've read, Imgur doesn't allow 3rd party hosting. Looks like the haven't been enforcing this Terms of Service, but if lots of people move over from Photobucket, they could get strict.

From Imgur Terms of Service -

Stuff not to do

... Also, don't use Imgur to host image libraries you link to from elsewhere, content for your website, advertising, avatars, or anything else that turns us into your content delivery network. If you do – and we will be the judge – or if you do anything illegal, in addition to any other legal rights we may have, we will ban you along with the site you're hotlinking from, delete all your images, report you to the authorities if necessary, and prevent you from viewing any images hosted on Imgur.com. We mean it.

[mad_gater]

Looks like there's a hack you can use if your photos are on Photobucket and are no longer displaying.

If you change .jpg to .jpg~original in the Photobucket URL, the image appears.

I edited some previous posts and it looks like it works. Who knows when this will stop working, though.


According to some posts I've read, Imgur doesn't allow 3rd party hosting. Looks like the haven't been enforcing this Terms of Service, but if lots of people move over from Photobucket, they could get strict.

From Imgur Terms of Service -

I think all that's saying is "don't use imgur as a 3rd party advertising service"....meaning that I don't think this rule is saying you can't upload images to imgur and then provide the image's imgue link to other people

[mad_gater]

from what I've been reading though from their new terms of service for photobucket....it just means you can't use the IMG tag to link pictures from photobucket to GW forum threads...doesn't sound like they'd stop you from just linking to the photo using a good old-fashioned text URL (i.e., using the URL tag)

basically what using the IMG tag did was hotlink the photo, a practice that tends to gobble up enormous amounts of bandwidth on the host's server (in this case photobucket's servers)....as an example say you were sharing via hotlinking one of your files on photobucket....every hotlink to an image on PB gobbles up some of PB's bandwidth....and if you're hotlinking the same image on 100 different sites that's 100 times the amount of bandwidth that's normally used by the image being gobbled up just by that one image

so IMO PB has every right to make you pay for the extra bandwidth involved in hotlinking....and it upgrades to the servers to handle a lot of hotlinking unfortunately don't come cheap

to test this out I'm gonna post a regular text link to a pic of my dog that I have saved on photobucket: My dog

I have, however, noticed that the "download album" feature does appear to be broken for now

but if, as I suspect, this test link works (what I did was copy the URL text labeled "direct" for the image in question and pasted it into gateworld's URL generator)...I'd still be happy with photobucket as I still wouldn't have to pay for it since I"m happy to post text links rather than hotlinks to the pics in my PB album

I think before photobucket was betting on people who quote posts containing a hotlinked image to remove the IMG tags off the hotlinked image in the quote and thereby turn it into a text-based link in order to limit consumption of bandwidth on their servers...but since that courtesy seems to have fallen by the wayside.....PB is now looking to recoup the bandwidth losses inherent in a lot of hotlinks floating around by charging users money if they want extra bandwidth

[Annoyed]

I think all that's saying is "don't use imgur as a 3rd party advertising service"....meaning that I don't think this rule is saying you can't upload images to imgur and then provide the image's imgue link to other people

I read the same thing you did, but to me it clearly meant they were not to be used as a 3rd party.

This is just the end result of the war between advertisers and web users. Sites like Photobucket are advertising driven, I get that. And I have no problem with static, non-intrusive banners and such.

But the marketing mentality is that "if they aren't buying your product, scream at them louder". This has been seen in used car ads going back to the dawn of TV.

The Internet variation on this is scripts coming from numerous 3rd party sources with ad content that jumps up and down, makes it difficult to look at the content, slows your computer to a crawl and sometimes installs malware.

The computer users sensible response to this is ad blockers, script blockers and such. This cuts revenue for Photobucket.
So their response is to simply charge directly for the use of their services.

The solution is for the ad industry to make their ads less intrusive and to serve them from the domain the content is coming from so the end user can make an informed decision about whether to allow scripts from a domain name.

I would say that we can expect this when pigs fly, but we've already seen that in an ad....

[planet_tv]

I have been using https://imgbox.com/ for the last week or so. It did take me a while to figure out where to get the links from but so far it's working out for the most part. Now the only thing I don't like is that there's no easy way to see the filename of an image without viewing the image and moving the mouse over it to let a tool tip appear or just right clicking to save image but without actually saving it. Also, unlike Photobucket, you can't have sub-folders/sub-galleries from what I have seen.

This is something I mentioned in AFA thread about Photobucket: I did notice something else about Photobucket and it was sort of odd so I thought I would mention it. When I went to fix the rest of the images on my forum, I would go to the folder on Photobucket I had an image in to view it and get the filename but instead I found that evil Photobucket image, after clicking the thumbnail which was fine. It only went away after I fixed the links to my images, ImgBox instead of Photobucket, and cleaned out the cache.

[watcher652]

from what I've been reading though from their new terms of service for photobucket....it just means you can't use the IMG tag to link pictures from photobucket to GW forum threads...doesn't sound like they'd stop you from just linking to the photo using a good old-fashioned text URL (i.e., using the URL tag)

You have to pay $100 to post that link -

Choose the plan that’s right for you and enjoy the premium member benefits.

Plus 50 offers 50GB of Storage and No Linking or 3rd Party Hosting
Plus 100 offers 100GB of Storage, Unlimited Linking, and No 3rd Party Hosting
Plus 500 offers 500GB of Storage, Unlimited Linking, Unlimited Bandwidth, and Unlimited 3rd Party Hosting
Ad free browsing
Get FREE monthly Print Shop giveaways & exclusive offers, valued up to $500
Two months free with an Annualized Plan
Plus 500 members receive all of the above, PLUS dedicated url and support

The Plus 50 is $60 a year. Since you're not allowed to link or 3rd party host, IMO it's just a backup site.
Plus 100 is $100. You can link for this price.
Plus 500 with the 3rd party hosting is $400. I bet this is how most people were using Photobucket (PB). It was the way I was using the service.

so IMO PB has every right to make you pay for the extra bandwidth involved in hotlinking....and it upgrades to the servers to handle a lot of hotlinking unfortunately don't come cheap

I'm not saying that PB shouldn't charge people for using their service. I'm saying to go from free to $400 with no warning or notification (at least from what I've read, I certainly didn't get any notification) or time to make alternate plans is poor business.

I have thousands of photos at Photobucket. Which, since the Download Album function seems to be broken/disabled (it probably uses too much bandwidth that I haven't paid for), I now have to download one by one. Yes, I do have them somewhere, but not organized in the way I have them on PB. I've been using the service since 2004, a year after they started. I've added to my folders from many places on my computer(s) over the years.

[mad_gater]

You have to pay $100 to post that link -



The Plus 50 is $60 a year. Since you're not allowed to link or 3rd party host, IMO it's just a backup site.
Plus 100 is $100. You can link for this price.
Plus 500 with the 3rd party hosting is $400. I bet this is how most people were using Photobucket (PB). It was the way I was using the service.




I'm not saying that PB shouldn't charge people for using their service. I'm saying to go from free to $400 with no warning or notification (at least from what I've read, I certainly didn't get any notification) or time to make alternate plans is poor business.

I have thousands of photos at Photobucket. Which, since the Download Album function seems to be broken/disabled (it probably uses too much bandwidth that I haven't paid for), I now have to download one by one. Yes, I do have them somewhere, but not organized in the way I have them on PB. I've been using the service since 2004, a year after they started. I've added to my folders from many places on my computer(s) over the years.

Well my test link (the text URL to a pic of my dog) seems to work and I don't appear to have been charged one red cent for posting the text link or accessing the image via that link. When they refer to "image linking" I don't think they're referring to text-based links to your images. I think they're referring to hotlinking the images via things like IMG tags. A text-based link to the image via the URL tag is not the same think as a hotlink

I do agree though that it's poor business to disable a "download album" feature, if that is what has happened, without so much as a "by your leave"

But if you can live with being restricted to simple text-based links to your images via the URL labeled "direct" you can stick with the free account.

[Ian-S]

Sorry to say your dog pic link doesn't work, I get the 'please upgrade' image when I click the link, I suspect this is because you are signed in to photobucket when you click your own link so the site is seeing you as the owner and showing it to you.

Thumbnails still work though, append the URL/IMG link with th_ before the filename and it'll display ok:

[mad_gater]

Sorry to say your dog pic link doesn't work, I get the 'please upgrade' image when I click the link, I suspect this is because you are signed in to photobucket when you click your own link so the site is seeing you as the owner and showing it to you.

Thumbnails still work though, append the URL/IMG link with th_ before the filename and it'll display ok:

<snipped>

yeah I saw that too.....it's funny because I wasn't signed in to photobucket when I clicked the test link using Maxthon and it still showed it but tried copying the URL address into internet explorer and got what you got

[watcher652]

For those of you who have photos on tinypic, I see it's a "Photobucket Video & Photo Sharing Company." So who knows what Photobucket has planned for that company.

[Falcon Horus]

The sole reason Photobucket decided to charge for hotlinking is because the free accounts which are a whoopin' 75% of their users do not make them money. Sure, they throw adverts at you as a free user (which most probably circumvented anyway) but it just wasn't worth it.

It's all about the money since the CEO of Photobucket changed in February 2017.

They just need to get rid of all the free users and hope the rest will cough up 400 dollars a year to store their images for hotlinking.

If any of those have a shred of smart in them, they take their images away and store them on a private server somewhere which is by far a lot cheaper, or use personal space provided by internet providers. It's even cheaper (a great deal too) to pay for a personal webspace and store images there (which is what I'm going to be doing -- for a part of my images).

Fandom images will be moved over to a new hosting site until I find a more permanent solution (probably personal webspace as well).

[Annoyed]

If any of those have a shred of smart in them, they take their images away and store them on a private server somewhere which is by far a lot cheaper, or use personal space provided by internet providers. It's even cheaper (a great deal too) to pay for a personal webspace and store images there (which is what I'm going to be doing -- for a part of my images).

There are risks to that. Opening a web server to the 'net exposes it to the risk that it could be hacked, and subsequently used to for the hacker's interests.
I run a server on my home network for various reasons, but access is blocked by firewall, inside interface only please. But I don't want to spend the time, effort and energy required to keep it properly secure to open it up to the net. And I don't think most casual web users would either.