The all inclusive PhotoBucket issues,problems and solutions

[JimVonBaden]

Re: PHOTOBUCKET is holding some member's photos as hostage. what are the best options

Google does this all the time, that is how they got so big. Build a product that can be given away for free (gmail is a good example in the very early days), then charge for upgraded services or extra features.

Photobucket sort of did this. Free photo hosting to attract users. Run "light" ads for passive revenue. Then they had services like you could order prints, and other physical items with your photos on them. Mind you this was novel and worth while in the early 2000's when they started as people were still in transition of film to digital and getting physical prints from digital was something people wanted. Obviously the landscape of what pictures people want to have as physical media has changed.

Photobucket is a little late to the party in coming up with a tiered set of packages for more storage or services. They tried upping the advertising, but putting "resource heavy" ads in probably drove more and more people away from even accessing the site OR drove people to run an Ad-blocker on the site. Both scenarios reduce Ad impressions and thus revenue share.

I also think mobile computing (ie. people with phones) sort of affected this as people on phones use "the internet" differently through apps rather than browsers which affects how that traffic can be monetized. Also I don't know but I might assume Photobucket didn't have an app or if they did it might have been cumbersome.

Now they obviously had to make a drastic price hike and use a version of extortion (I am using the term very loosely here) to get people to buy into it.

PB has had tiered services for some time. I have been a paid 2nd tier for years.

 

[drivesitfar]

Re: PHOTOBUCKET is holding some member's photos as hostage. what are the best options

JIM: did you lose all your 3rd party hostings by PB too being a paying customer?

 

[JimVonBaden]

Re: PHOTOBUCKET is holding some member's photos as hostage. what are the best options

JIM: did you lose all your 3rd party hostings by PB too being a paying customer?

No, but I expect I will when my contract runs out in August.

 

[drivesitfar]

Re: PHOTOBUCKET is holding some member's photos as hostage. what are the best options

JIM: i'm guessing that might be more than a few pictures that would disappear or have you stopped using PB before this last change?

also are you able to link pictures from your website on dotster.com to GJ or other forums? do tell how you do that for some of the members that are looking for that option if you have a minute.

thanks

ALL: contrary to the OPINIONS of a few of the members downloading pictures directly to GJ seems like the best option to guarantee that the threads in GJ remain as they are as long as GJ is a website/forum.

 

[Strouty]

Re: PHOTOBUCKET is holding some member's photos as hostage. what are the best options

I would be curious to see how many photos GJ hosts versus how many are embedded or linked.

As for starting another thread because someone typed a "bad" word, well................

 

[JimVonBaden]

Re: PHOTOBUCKET is holding some member's photos as hostage. what are the best options

JIM: i'm guessing that might be more than a few pictures that would disappear or have you stopped using PB before this last change?

also are you able to link pictures from your website on dotster.com to GJ or other forums? do tell how you do that for some of the members that are looking for that option if you have a minute.

thanks

ALL: contrary to the OPINIONS of a few of the members downloading pictures directly to GJ seems like the best option to guarantee that the threads in GJ remain as they are as long as GJ is a website/forum.

I switched to ImageShack as soon as I saw the news. I will lose many hundreds of photos on this forum, and thousands more on other forums. I doubt I will rebuild any threads, I just do not have the time.

I can host photos from my site, but it is pretty awkward, so I have not.

 

[rayra]

Re: Attention GJers-Check your Photobucket accounts

IMGUR, Flickr, and now smugmug, they all supplant my filenames with their own alphanumeric scramble unique file names. This is unworkable for re-editing all my topics with relocated images.
Would work ok starting from scratch, as you go. But I've got at least 1500 images I'd like to go restore, across several forums. And having to look at the old image link, find that image on my drive, then visually scroll thru 1-1500 images looking for the match to copy/paste its new link, well that's unworkable.
still looking for a hosting solution that will let me use my original filenames or at least retain them as a prefix, as photobucket did.

 

[y'sguy]

Re: Attention GJers-Check your Photobucket accounts

naf305, I just stumbled thru your method. and it works! I've never used PB and fyi I use to host images thru a website I owned so I never had a problem at that time. I quit paying annually on that one and let it go. But until now I never had any success with Google to host anything and I am not as savvy as naf305! Thanks for figuring it out for people like me!

 

[-Brent-]

Re: PHOTOBUCKET is holding some member's photos as hostage. what are the best options

ALL: contrary to the OPINIONS of a few of the members downloading pictures directly to GJ seems like the best option to guarantee that the threads in GJ remain as they are as long as GJ is a website/forum.

Sigh. I get you're writing to ALL but I assume I'm one of the FEW you refer to.

I believe that my online life should be close my real-life persona. Someday my children will read my words and it's important to me that they'll be able to read that my values were reflected online as they were in life. With that said, I don't get all that pissed off in real life or let folks online get to me. But, I did let you get to me. It bothered me that I got so fired up about it. That's on me.

A big commitment in my life is to let people be who they are, especially when I don't agree with them. I didn't do that. I made an assumption and acted on it. Lesson learned.

As far as the above quote, I'm hesitant but still I'll say this: uploading photos to the GJ is obviously a smart option. As long as the site is maintained well, all should be good. However, there is an impact to frivolous uploading. You may never hear about it or even care but when the site goes from Bulletin to Xenforo, eventually, your likely 15k+ photos (along with all our photos) will impact the migration. It's not links won't transfer well, too. Nor are all other hosts as troublesome as PB. It's likely that the 12 Gauge Garage thread will retain its pics as long as your advice/educational posts.

 

[gasman23]

Re: PHOTOBUCKET is holding some member's photos as hostage. what are the best options

At one time many websites like this one did not offer local image hosting. The only way to reliably get a photo to show in your post was through third party image sites like photobucket

I like to post my pictures on different forums, some of them don`t offer local image hosting.
That`s why I used Photobucket

 

[sevt_chevelle]

Re: Photobucket Just Screwed Me Real Hard

Their site is AFU right now. I am a paid subscriber and can't do **** on the site.

I have opened an ImageShack account. You can do batch uploading, batch image tagging and posting. $18.95 a year. Hopefully they do not go the way of Photobucket in the future.

What service are you getting for 19 dollars a year?

All I see is the
Basic 38 yr
Pro for 286 yr
Premium for 954 yr

 

[ctimrun]

Re: Photobucket Just Screwed Me Real Hard

PB became almost unusable in recent months anyway, I enjoyed deleting my account after this ($400!) stunt.

 

[ctimrun]

Re: Photobucket Just Screwed Me Real Hard

Is Flickr any better? Looks like their "pro" subscription is $50 per year.

 

[alwaysFlOoReD]

Re: Photobucket alternatives...

New info on web hosts.

 

[dwasifar]

Re: Photobucket Just Screwed Me Real Hard

Anyone with any geekery skills at all could consider just getting a domain and hosting services. Namecheap.com is selling some domain registrations for $5.58 for FIVE years. Granted they're weird domains like .stream and .cricket but what difference does it make if you're only going to use it to have your own personal photobucket? 1&1 has hosting plans for $8/mo. That's less than a quarter of what Photobucket is trying to charge, and you'd be able to do more with it than just host photos if you get the urge.

 

[JimVonBaden]

Re: Photobucket Just Screwed Me Real Hard

What service are you getting for 19 dollars a year?

All I see is the
Basic 38 yr
Pro for 286 yr
Premium for 954 yr

That is the new rate, not the old one.

 

[DCarr2]

Re: Photobucket Just Screwed Me Real Hard

I thought the same as well.


My first thought was PB got hacked or something. My second thought, since I'm not a FB user, is the possibility they don't want their links showing up on FB any more as that would probably use a metric **** ton of bandwidth.


EDIT: seems like they want to ruin their business. Terms of use; update June 28, 2017

http://photobucket.com/terms

Free account : Each individual Member gets one free account that provides 2 GB of free storage or space available for your original photo files, or videos under 10min. The free account does not allow any image linking or 3rd party image hosting. If a free account Member exceeds their Content Limit, their account will be immediately suspended and they will need to become a “Paying Member” (defined below) in order to continue accessing their account. You can upgrade to a Plus account at any time.


Available Plus Account Plans : Photobucket offers the following Plus Account Plans:
o Plus 50 Plan: 52 GB of Storage for $59.99 / Year. The Plus 50 Plan does not allow any image linking or 3rd party image hosting.

o Plus 100 Plan: 102 GB of Storage for $99.99 / Year. The Plus 100 Plan allows for unlimited image linking but does not allow 3rd party image hosting.

o Plus 500 Plan: 500 GB of Storage and unlimited bandwidth for $399.99 / Year. The Plus 500 Plan allows for unlimited image linking and unlimited 3rd party image hosting.

Honestly, I'm not sure why most people would want to use PB if they can't do 3rd party image hosting. Apparently, they didn't learn from IMGUR not allowing photos to be hosted on sites with classifieds and jumping ship.

with that wording, theyre leaving themselves WIDE open for litigation.

 

[DCarr2]

Re: Photobucket Just Screwed Me Real Hard

Ad-free and Plus Account Members are responsible for providing (and updating when necessary) complete and accurate billing and contact information to Photobucket.

Ad-free and Plus Account Members can cancel at any time by contacting [email protected]. If you cancel, except as provided below, you will not be charged for any future term of service, and you will continue to receive the service you purchased through the end of the paid term. Fees are non-refundable except as may be required by applicable law. In the event that Photobucket offers a monthly recurring payment option for any of its Plus Accounts, such offer may require a six-month or annual commitment that commences upon the date in which the Plus Account subscription is purchased by the Member and ends on its six-month or one year anniversary, as applicable (“Commitment Period”). In the event that a Member selects the monthly recurring payment option (if offered) and later terminates his/her Plus Account prior to the natural expiration of the Commitment Period, such Member shall be responsible for the immediate payment of an early termination fee equal to the product of the monthly recurring amount times the months remaining in the Commitment Period. Such payment shall be payable by the credit card or other form of payment that was used at the time of purchase. In the event that such credit card or other form of payment is no longer valid, the Member shall be responsible for making other payment arrangements.
· If any fee is not paid in a timely manner, or Photobucket is unable to process your transaction using the credit card information provided, Photobucket may suspend or terminate your account until such time as the applicable payment is made. At our discretion, Photobucket may also delete some or all of Your Content so as to reduce your storage space below the applicable Content Limit, which would result in the conversion of your Plus account to a free account (which is subject to the restrictions described in these Terms).

In the event that Photobucket elects to seek payment of the early termination fee described above through an outside collection agency, the Member shall be responsible for the full cost and expense associated with such collection efforts in addition to the payment of accrued interest between the date in which Photobucket attempts to charge the early termination fee and the date in which the fee is actually paid at rate of 1.5% per month or the highest rate allowed by applicable law.

So basically their playing hard ball, I question whether what legal standing theyd have to uphold such in a court. The way its worded sounds like a law student wrote it.... So if you cancel before your 6month commitment is up they will charge you for the 6 months anyways... if you dont pay they will send a collection agency after you which will ruin your credit. Oh and they will delete all your pictures too... and then attempt to force you to pay for them to ruin your credit...

heres the next one

Content & Privacy

You retain all your rights to any Content you submit, upload or display on or while using Photobucket. This means that you own all the Content you post and are responsible for its settings:

· You can mark any Content you upload as "private." Content marked "private" will not show up in public search results on the Site and only Users you have given access will be able view the Content either in your album or in search results.

· Although we have created measures to protect your privacy, please be aware that just because something is marked "private," does not mean that only the people you invite will see it. Users may still be able to find the direct URL for a photo or video through other search mechanisms, and then share or link to it outside the Site.

See this is where it will get ugly in court...

If you remove your Content from the Site or mark Content as "private" that was previously public, Photobucket will promptly hide it from search results on the Site; however, we might still have it stored in backup files or on servers, and we may retain it as needed. We are not responsible for sites that it was shared to before it was marked "private."

· When you make your Content public, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, non-revocable, right and license to copy, sell, convey, distribute, stream, post, publicly display (e.g. post it elsewhere), reproduce and create derivative works from it (meaning things based on it), whether in print or any kind of electronic version that exists now or is later developed, for any purpose, including a commercial purpose with the right to sublicense such rights to others.

· By making your content public, you are also giving other Members on Photobucket the right to copy, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and create derivative works from it via the Site, third party websites or applications (for example, via services allowing Members to order prints of Content or t-shirts and similar items containing Content, and via social media websites), provided such use is not for a commercial purpose.

again, their hoping by using fancy wording they can get around the copyright issue... since they admitted that the pictures belong to you, and only you, and there is no marking of further exclusions, this could be argued in court... It would be like you creating a logo for your business and someone copies it... you by yourself probably wont win, but 1000 of you has a good chance at winning.

love this part...

You may cease use of the Photobucket Services at any time. Even after you are no longer a Member, you will still be responsible for the promises you have made to us about your Content. You'll be responsible for any damages that result from your breaking those promises as further outlined below.

I honestly question the legality of their TOS, and doubt it would hold up in court.

I wonder how many use this nifty feature?
http://photobucket.com/desktop

you know the more I look into this the more this whole thing looks like a shady scam type deal

 

[JimVonBaden]

Re: Attention GJers-Check your Photobucket accounts

Supermotors.net

Free pic hosting with watermark on 3rd party hosted pics.

$12.99 a year with no watermark.

Not mine. Just a cool truck.

Only good if you are posting vehicle related images. It is in their TOS!

I switched to ImageShack. Easy to use and $18.95 a year.

 

[manwithtools]

Re: PHOTOBUCKET is holding some member's photos as hostage. what are the best options

I cleaned out my PB account and deleted my membership yesterday. I fixed a few threads here and elsewhere, but I'm sure I missed some.

I think they way they are handling this is very short sighted. I realize they need revenue, but their approach is very abrasive. I would not be surprised to see them go completely away.

Thanks to this thread, I was reminded of the value I get from GJ. I just became an Alliance member. Great job with this site Ryan.

 

[OzarkMan]

Re: Photobucket Just Screwed Me Real Hard

Well, I am glad I deleted and cancelled my free membership. Don't need to worry about legal **** from such a ****** company.

 

[250]

Re: Photobucket alternatives...

I have a Mac, will that make a difference?

None at all. Same principles, same .jpg files.

 

[J Persons]

Re: Attention GJers-Check your Photobucket accounts

I've had a Photobucket account since 2004, and I think they started in 2003. The original intent of PB was to host images for sites like ebay and Craig's list, but they started selling all that fluff, stuff like calendars, albums, canvas prints, etc. And have seemed to have forgotten their core customers. I had a little over 1800 images, which was a little over 2GB, but also kept almost all of them on my computer, so if I wanted to, I could have deleted my account with no problems.
I started looking for another site after PB cut their own throat, and decided on www.imageshack.com It's $18.00/year for the premium account with the first month free and they have unlimited uploads and 3d party hosting. The photos upload very quickly either by file or by drag and drop. Using drag and drop takes less than 3 seconds per image. The only thing I don't care for is their album format, but I can live with that.
Getting back to PB, I went on their site today and noticed a bunch of my photos are missing, replaced by a dialog saying that I have deleted or moved them. Well, that didn't happen. The only way that they got deleted was for PB to delete them. I've been pretty critical of them on a couple of boards in the last week or so and the deletion may just be payback, but it's not a big deal, most all my photos are on my computer anyway. I am through with them, they will never get another dime of my money.

 

[Joe13]

Re: Photobucket Just Screwed Me Real Hard

Their new plans ****! Several years ago I was running low on storage and I got their Plus20 account for 3.00 one-time fee. I have 30gb of storage and no recurring payment. So far and photos I have posted seem to still work. I wonder how long until they un-grandfather me. I would hate to have to re-host and re-link photos. i have multiple build threads across multiple forums that would go sour.

 

[alwaysFlOoReD]

Re: Photobucket Just Screwed Me Real Hard

Their new plans ****! Several years ago I was running low on storage and I got their Plus20 account for 3.00 one-time fee. I have 30gb of storage and no recurring payment. So far and photos I have posted seem to still work. I wonder how long until they un-grandfather me. I would hate to have to re-host and re-link photos. i have multiple build threads across multiple forums that would go sour.

I would start now. Get a paid image hosting or get your own website and start transferring links while you can still see them. All my pics are blocked and it's twice as slow looking them up and linking a new photo in than if I could see the photobucket pic/img. I started a different thread on photobucket alternatives where I list a lot of hosts and sites,some with prices;

https://www.garagejournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=364507

 

[gungatim]

Re: Photobucket Just Screwed Me Real Hard

weird, I just went there and my stuff is all there. there are lots of ads now though. never had ads before. I haven't used it in forever since most sites let you upload directly now...

 

[AMCguy]

Re: Photobucket Just Screwed Me Real Hard

OP here,

This is weird. They have taken about twenty of my pictures out of my library and replaced them with that upgrade image. Some of my pictures that look fine, as soon as I click on it to try and save it, I get redirected to a click bait type of site.

Also, some of my images are re-appearing in my threads. I went trough my welding table thread which had all the broken links and started to replace the pics. Then some of the original ones I haven't gotten to yet started to re-appear.

I hate these pricks.

 

[JCQuick]

Re: Photobucket Just Screwed Me Real Hard

I posted that I sen them a harsh email and the sent a robotic response last night I got another email wanting me to fill out a customer service survey needless to say I don't think they will like my answers

 

[thejunkmanadv]

Re: Photobucket Just Screwed Me Real Hard

I am really tempted to walk into the main office and just see who I can talk with, just nicely ask some questions about how they are handling things.

 

[TwoBytes]

Re: PHOTOBUCKET is holding some member's photos as hostage. what are the best options

I have my own website, so it's no brainer to put photos in there.

It's not the most economical or easy to use solution, but it's a lot cheaper than $400/year!

I pay $9.95/month at www.hostmonster.com

I had a bit of luck testing out the process outlined below for Andy (oldironfarmer), and it seems to have worked out OK.

PhotoBucket allows an album download, although large albums failed to download for me (always failing at about 50%, give or take 20%).

But that's probably because I'm in Australia...

So in order to download large albums, I've had success running up an EC2 instance in AWS (Amazon Web Services) and downloading from there.

For example, an 800MB album was taking 20-30 minutes to get to 50% on my home internet connection before failing (and it's a relatively fast connection, 60mbps down, 30 up, so I don't know where the bottleneck is). Downloading to an AWS EC2 instance only took a few minutes.

It downloads as one big zip file, so once I had that on the EC2 machine, I just had to login to the cPanel interface for my website and use file manager to upload it to a folder that had the same name as the PhotoBucket album. I could have used FTP, but using the web based file manager allowed me to upload the zip, instead of 2,000 individual files, and the just select it and hit "extract".

Once they were in there, I just set the folder to have public read permissions.

Then for each post that had the nasty PB ransom pic, just edit the post and replace the prefix...

http://s32.photobucket.com/albumname/

with

http://www.mywebsite.com/albumname/

PB adds a random string to the end of the photos, but if you download the album from PB, it keeps the filename. If you upload the originals from your PC, you would also need to remove the appended randomness.

For anybody who doesn't have, or want, their own website, but is willing to go through a slight learning curve, I think a better option might be to put your image files in Amazon's AWS S3 service...
https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

It's ridiculously cheap, at $0.023/GB/Month

So Drives' 1.38GB mentioned above would cost about 38 cents/year.

There's additional costs for data transfer, but that's likely to be pretty minimal too. The first GB of transfer out to the internet is free, and 9c/GB after that.

Even if every photo was read hundreds of times each month, it's still down in the low dollars/month, and I think the nature of forum posts would be that new posts get looked at lots, and old photos get viewed very rarely.

Here's what I just did as a test...

Opened the AWS management console here...
https://www.amazon.com/?tag=atomicindus08-20

Clicked on the S3 service under "Storage", which took me to here...
https://console.aws.amazon.com/s3/

- Click "Create bucket"
- Gave it a name - "twobytes-garagejournal-images"
- Click "Next", leave properties as default
- Click "Next"
- Under "Manage Permissions", change to "Grant Public Read Access"
- Click "Next"
- Click "Create Bucket"

Then click on your new bucket and click "upload" and follow the bouncing ball to get your photos in there. Just remember to grant public read permissions to each file.

Once they're in there, click on the file name to get the public web address, like this...

https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/twobytes-garagejournal-images/suba0371.jpg

Then wrap IMG tags around it, and wah-lah! Bob's your ex-Prime Minister...

Once you've done a few, you won't need to fetch the full address for each one, just copy the prefix over and add your file name manually.

I hope that rambling late night post made some sense to somebody somewhere! Happy to answer questions if anybody wants to ask any.

 

[TwoBytes]

Re: Photobucket alternatives...

I just posted this over on the other thread about this issue, so I thought I'd add it in here too. Hope that's OK.

I have my own website, so it's no brainer to put photos in there.

It's not the most economical or easy to use solution, but it's a lot cheaper than $400/year!

I pay $9.95/month at www.hostmonster.com

I had a bit of luck testing out the process outlined below for Andy (oldironfarmer), and it seems to have worked out OK.

PhotoBucket allows an album download, although large albums failed to download for me (always failing at about 50%, give or take 20%).

But that's probably because I'm in Australia...

So in order to download large albums, I've had success running up an EC2 instance in AWS (Amazon Web Services) and downloading from there.

For example, an 800MB album was taking 20-30 minutes to get to 50% on my home internet connection before failing (and it's a relatively fast connection, 60mbps down, 30 up, so I don't know where the bottleneck is). Downloading to an AWS EC2 instance only took a few minutes.

It downloads as one big zip file, so once I had that on the EC2 machine, I just had to login to the cPanel interface for my website and use file manager to upload it to a folder that had the same name as the PhotoBucket album. I could have used FTP, but using the web based file manager allowed me to upload the zip, instead of 2,000 individual files, and the just select it and hit "extract".

Once they were in there, I just set the folder to have public read permissions.

Then for each post that had the nasty PB ransom pic, just edit the post and replace the prefix...

http://s32.photobucket.com/albumname/

with

http://www.mywebsite.com/albumname/

PB adds a random string to the end of the photos, but if you download the album from PB, it keeps the filename. If you upload the originals from your PC, you would also need to remove the appended randomness.

For anybody who doesn't have, or want, their own website, but is willing to go through a slight learning curve, I think a better option might be to put your image files in Amazon's AWS S3 service...
https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

It's ridiculously cheap, at $0.023/GB/Month

So Drives' 1.38GB mentioned above would cost about 38 cents/year.

There's additional costs for data transfer, but that's likely to be pretty minimal too. The first GB of transfer out to the internet is free, and 9c/GB after that.

Even if every photo was read hundreds of times each month, it's still down in the low dollars/month, and I think the nature of forum posts would be that new posts get looked at lots, and old photos get viewed very rarely.

Here's what I just did as a test...

Opened the AWS management console here...
https://www.amazon.com/?tag=atomicindus08-20

Clicked on the S3 service under "Storage", which took me to here...
https://console.aws.amazon.com/s3/

- Click "Create bucket"
- Gave it a name - "twobytes-garagejournal-images"
- Click "Next", leave properties as default
- Click "Next"
- Under "Manage Permissions", change to "Grant Public Read Access"
- Click "Next"
- Click "Create Bucket"

Then click on your new bucket and click "upload" and follow the bouncing ball to get your photos in there. Just remember to grant public read permissions to each file.

Once they're in there, click on the file name to get the public web address, like this...

https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/twobytes-garagejournal-images/suba0371.jpg

Then wrap IMG tags around it, and wah-lah! Bob's your ex-Prime Minister...

Once you've done a few, you won't need to fetch the full address for each one, just copy the prefix over and add your file name manually.

I hope that rambling late night post made some sense to somebody somewhere! Happy to answer questions if anybody wants to ask any.

 

[Orionrising]

Re: PHOTOBUCKET is holding some member's photos as hostage. what are the best options

Does anyone know where images uploaded via Tapatalk go? To gj hosting or is Tapatalk hosting them?

Sent from my Moto G (4) using Tapatalk

 

[drivesitfar]

Re: PHOTOBUCKET is holding some member's photos as hostage. what are the best options

Onion: I've never had an easy time loading pictures from my cell phone so i usually email pictures off my cell phone to myself to save on my laptop and then I post off my laptop when i have time after editing them.

i bet when i get a new Iphone i'll probably use TAPATALK cause i hear it works pretty well.

TB: THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR TAKING THE TIME TO MAKE THAT POST!!

what you did for Andy's (OLDIRONFARMER) thread was just AMAZING after all his PB linked pictures disappeared!

when the rain and cold come again which it does every November here i'll go back and read your post many times to maybe store some of my huge picture files on Amazon's site so my laptop will maybe run a bit quicker. for all the pictures i have on it though it runs fast enough for me now.

ALL: i'm happy i thought that posting directly to GJ might be a good idea about 4 years ago when i left PHOTOBOOK and for you that want to post pictures direct to GJ you can download up to 7 pictures per post just by clicking on the paperclip just above where you are writing your posts to attach pictures like you would on most emails.

good luck and for those of you still missing pictures on your threads i hope you don't stop posting and maybe fix the old pictures as you have time!!

 

[JimVonBaden]

Re: PHOTOBUCKET is holding some member's photos as hostage. what are the best options

Direct uploading, then copying the link, then putting it in the proper place on the post, is just way too much work. That is why I like hosting sites. Plus I can cross post to several forums. You can't do that with direct uploading.

 

[drivesitfar]

Re: PHOTOBUCKET is holding some member's photos as hostage. what are the best options

JIM: i've always known there was an easier way to do pictures than what i do, but i'm still happy i left PB before they did this last payment plan. i still have all my pictures on GJ and all my pictures on my laptop in case i need them to help a member. even the pictures on my half dead old laptop are still obtainable if i want to deal with a little frustration and it being so SLOOOOOOOW.

thanks and if you have more methods to describe to us so some of us less computer literate guys and gals can understand as TwoBytes did please do.

 

[thejunkmanadv]

Re: PHOTOBUCKET is holding some member's photos as hostage. what are the best options

I won't be going back and fixing any of my threads unfortunately. I will be slowly getting my most "shareable" pictures up on my website and then just grab the links from there for the future.

 

[-Brent-]

Re: PHOTOBUCKET is holding some member's photos as hostage. what are the best options

Thanks for the legwork, TwoBytes, good info.

Even if every photo was read hundreds of times each month, it's still down in the low dollars/month, and I think the nature of forum posts would be that new posts get looked at lots, and old photos get viewed very rarely.

I didn't want to overlook this, however, and have people (like Dean) mistakenly think that this means tens of thousands of uploads to a forum, like previously referenced, don't (or could not) have an impact.

A few guys equalling a few bucks a month each isn't a blip on the radar but when that number grows - things change. I only stick to this because I've seen it, more than a few times.

I need to reread what you've done because I'd like to restore a couple threads. If possible, could I bug you via PM TwoBytes?

 

[JimVonBaden]

Re: PHOTOBUCKET is holding some member's photos as hostage. what are the best options

I won't be going back and fixing any of my threads unfortunately. I will be slowly getting my most "shareable" pictures up on my website and then just grab the links from there for the future.

I have well over 1000photos from PB on here. No way I am fixing all of them. I might add one post and fix a couple of my build threads.

 

[TwoBytes]

Re: PHOTOBUCKET is holding some member's photos as hostage. what are the best options

Thanks for the legwork, TwoBytes, good info.

I didn't want to overlook this, however, and have people (like Dean) mistakenly think that this means tens of thousands of uploads to a forum, like previously referenced, don't (or could not) have an impact.

A few guys equalling a few bucks a month each isn't a blip on the radar but when that number grows - things change. I only stick to this because I've seen it, more than a few times.

I need to reread what you've done because I'd like to restore a couple threads. If possible, could I bug you via PM TwoBytes?

Hi Brent,

No worries mate.

Yeah, I completely agree that whilst the costs of hosting some photos can be small change for an individual, it can really add up if you're responsible for hosting a popular site.

I do this sort of thing for a job, and I see it all the time. People look at AWS (Amazon Web Services) and see that they can get a virtual server for $0.20/hr, and storage for cents/GB/Month and think it will be cheap. Before they know it they've got Terabytes or even Petabytes of stuff stored in the cloud and 1,000s of servers and they're getting bills in the millions of dollars!

Feel free to PM me with any additional questions, or post them here if you think they'll be useful to others.

Cheers,

 

[drivesitfar]

Re: PHOTOBUCKET is holding some member's photos as hostage. what are the best options

ALL: for some of you reading this thread that want to believe the members that think they know where and what i post here are a few more stats and FACTS about me.

on a thread with almost 10,000,000 views (the Vises of Garage Journal) i have over 3,000 posts. i can't tell you how many pictures cause maybe the owners may not even know, but I post pictures to help members and maybe the non members that join and make 1 or 2 posts so they can see the pictures. more than likely i have over half my pictures on GJ on that thread.

i also run a Vise repair 101 thread that i have another 800 posts and more than a few pictures posting HELPING MEMBERS fix, repair or save money from not doing so on their vises.

i haven't yet posted on the PIN UP THREAD that is now extinct cause i married my own pin up.

i think i only have maybe 3 or 5 pictures on the WTF threads or any of FREE PARKING except the Weight loss or GET HEALTHY thread that i started so i might not have a heart attack from eating **** some of my life.

so using me as an example of maybe posting too many pictures on GJ is maybe someone's OPINION, but the owners of GJ and the mods haven't asked me to delete any. i haven't been BANNED like some members posting here complaining have been who by the generousity of the owners have been given a repreive and let back in to express their OPINIONS. if my pictures were deleted it wouldn't change my life cause i have all my pictures saved and usually only posted them to help other members.

please take this as my last post about ME on this thread cause i started this thread to SOLVE A PROBLEM. i still thinking posting pictures that help other members directly to GJ is something that will benefit not only the members, but also GJ so this issue never happens again. if it costs so much for X amount of memory this year who's to say it won't cost less the next year and so on. i still remember buying my first computer for $2000 that had 8 megs of Ram for memory and the computer guy said no way i'd need more than the 4 megs and the 386 that was only $1500.

I'm happy to hear TB's and other a few other member's ideas on how the problem can be either fixed or how we can cut our losses and move on which might be the best for a lot of you.