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Photobucket holding images hostage

Hunner

Well-Known Member
Messages
2,334
Location
Arkansas
I have not seen where there is a discussion of Photobucket blocking third party posting of images on here.

Yea I know there are alternatives, but I have over 3000 images on this forum that would have to be recreated individually in each post.

It's just what I started with and converting from Flicker or Google would be a huge effort.

I don't think I can handle that.

I have not had mine blocked, yet. I am paying for a higher level of service but not the $400 dollars a year they want to have the 3rd party service.

I have read some forums are figuring out how to restore them somehow, but that too would be a huge undertaking.

Sorry
 

chaos254

Well-Known Member
Messages
577
Location
United States
I saw it this on a few other forums as well. $400 a year is ridiculous, I hope everyone stops using them. It just sucks to lose all the photos that people have posted up


Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk
 

Hunner

Well-Known Member
Messages
2,334
Location
Arkansas
I don't know yet.
Maybe Google pictures or if I isolate the Hummer pictures only in an album to make public on Flicker. Still experimenting.

If they get away with this others may follow.

I do have a paid account, I'm not expecting the service for free but geeeze get real!

I may have to set up my own server.

I don't know how much data the forum can host, I know in the past it was an issue.
 

JPaul

Well-Known Member
Messages
2,400
Location
Way up north, UT
Imgur is what I use. Super easy to upload pics and post them on forums, they give you several different types of links/code for embedding in various types of sites. It's free, and I see nothing in their future making it otherwise.
 

alrock

El Diablo
Staff member
Messages
10,442
Location
Scottsdale
I use SmugMug for $60/year and it gives you a lot of options. No ads, good performance on the site. All of my images here are linked from SmugMug.

Sorry to hear about the Photobucket issues. I hadn't heard of that issue but I did notice some blocked images.
 

alrock

El Diablo
Staff member
Messages
10,442
Location
Scottsdale
Imgur is what I use. Super easy to upload pics and post them on forums, they give you several different types of links/code for embedding in various types of sites. It's free, and I see nothing in their future making it otherwise.
Okay, now I'm reading about this photobucket ransom demand. It appears while Imgur technically is capable of hotlinking, their terms of service may forbid it, so you may be similarly held hostage down the road.

Actually, SmugMug could be as little as $48 annually though I think I'm one plan up at $72. 3rd party linking is available on on price tiers.

Hunner, I wouldn't correct any past posts unless you get specific requests from users.
 

JPaul

Well-Known Member
Messages
2,400
Location
Way up north, UT
It appears while Imgur technically is capable of hotlinking, their terms of service may forbid it, so you may be similarly held hostage down the road.

I doubt their TOS forbids it. When you're in your profile and looking at one of your images, immediately to the right it has several URL's for that image that you can copy and paste to embed the image in various places. Here is what it looks like:

HvUlCNn.png


They are actually encouraging it by making it incredibly easy to do so.

Now they may end up creating paid accounts later on, sure. Ultimately you're at the mercy of whoever you go with no matter what, even if you already are paying for the service. The only way to fully control your images is to own your own physical server and have it co-located somewhere, but then you're still paying for that plus the bandwidth.

I think Imgur is different because it has such a huge amount of traffic flowing directly to their homepage (which has ads to the side and some promotional images that companies pay for, but nothing obnoxious like Photobucket's pile of garbage that reeks of the 90's) rather than most of it being embedded around the internet.

I also pre-size my images using the really basic photo editor in Microsoft Office (MS Office Picture Manager). It allows me to quickly resize images down to a few different preset sizes and flip them or whatever minor edits I need to do. I can do the same with Gimp on my Linux machines though that requires me to specify the exact size instead of having presets like MS Office Picture Manager. I like to keep all my photos a consistent size, so I try to avoid using Gimp. But pre-sizing them help reduce the amount of bandwidth the images end up using, so I stay lower under the radar. I'm willing to bet that Imgur has in its TOS restrictions about excessive bandwidth usage or something like that so that they can better manage overall bandwidth usage.
 
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3Hummers

Super Moderator
Staff member
Messages
10,398
Location
Central Texas
I hope 90 million of Photobucket users switch. This is a perfect opportunity for competitors to steal customers and market share.
 

alrock

El Diablo
Staff member
Messages
10,442
Location
Scottsdale
I doubt their TOS forbids it. When you're in your profile and looking at one of your images, immediately to the right it has several URL's for that image that you can copy and paste to embed the image in various places. Here is what it looks like:

They are actually encouraging it by making it incredibly easy to do so.
And yet they say this in their terms of service. http://imgur.com/tos (I added the bold)

"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."
 

JPaul

Well-Known Member
Messages
2,400
Location
Way up north, UT
I'm thinking though that is more for use cases like hosting your images for your website on their servers instead of your own, rather than using them to host images for things like posts you make on forums and such. Using the term "content delivery network" is key there. A CDN is used by commercial and/or very high traffic websites (like commercial sites, storefronts, super popular blogs, etc) to offload bandwidth for static files like images to permit their site to load faster for visitors (the web servers are able to focus bandwidth and processing power on delivering the site itself and don't have to spend time sending image files to the browser). Cloudflare, AWS, and other similar paid services are CDN's. Imgur just doesn't want to be abused by people that should be using an actual CDN but are being too cheap and try to use Imgur's servers instead for their business use.

Granted, the wording could allow them to consider people using their service for hosting images being posted to forums and such as the same thing, but it's kind of a stretch. But that does seem to be the wording that allows them to say: "You know what? Your post(s) is/are sucking an unreasonable amount of bandwidth from us so you need to go somewhere else." I think that based on the use of the term "content delivery network" in that part of the TOS and the fact that they make it ridiculously easy to link to your images from forum posts and reddit and similar "social" types of sites tells me that for the normal user who is using their service to host images for their own non-commercial posts on boards and whatnot Imgur is perfectly OK with that type of use. If they weren't then they wouldn't provide you with several types of code to link to your image directly without any effort on your part aside from simply clicking on your image in your album.
 

cgalpha08

"Like Nothing Else"
Messages
3,584
Location
Indianapolis, IN
I just started to use imgur to update my latest post, will have to get all of my photo bucket images re-uploaded at some point, but IMGUR is super easy to use, ill be using it from now on to link photos.
 

MixManSC

Member
Messages
19
Location
SC
I'm torn on this as I have 2 businesses and hosting large amounts of images does cost. With so many people nowadays using ad blockers how do you expect a site like Photobucket, Imgur, or any other to provide hosting of images for millions of people (their bandwidth bill has to be in the tens of thousands of dollars per month) for free when their main source of revenue is clicks and impressions from ads? I see everyone on all the forums freaking out and wishing death and destruction on Photobucket but it seems like no one is considering the costs of hosting the images. Nothing is free - in the case of most all free image hosts the cost is ads that get displayed with your images. When they are directly hot-linked there is no ad revenue, when people looking at them directly on the site and have some ad blocker there is no ad revenue. From a business perspective that is financial ruin and suicide and makes no sense. I know of several forums that are considering closing down because of the proliferation of ad blockers (a large percentage of forums and message boards rely on ad revenue to pay for the hosting of the forums) and others that are considering measures like restricting access to the majority of the forums unless a monthly or annual subscription is paid for..... Many forums, this one included do also allow you to upload images directly as well.
 

JPaul

Well-Known Member
Messages
2,400
Location
Way up north, UT
MixMan, the problem is more with how they approached it. There was no several month-long email campaign to inform their customers of the upcoming changes and to try to encourage them to upgrade or switch to another service. There was no "Here's some tiered plans that will fit your needs" or even a pay-by-month option for the $400 plan they were forcing you to choose if you wanted to keep your images up.

It was a straight up ransom for your images overnight, they quietly changed their TOS (which yes, they are allowed to do, but I've never seen a company be such a dick about it), and then requiring you to pay $400 UPFRONT before they'd allow your images to be visible again. That's akin to what's his face buying that drug and then raising the price overnight ten fold without so much as a "Sorry." And from what I've seen Photobucket has the same "Screw you, I'll charge you whatever I feel like and you'll be happy about it" attitude.

I'm sure if they had been more reasonable about it, like, I don't know, telling everyone well in advance that this was going to happen, then it wouldn't have been anywhere near as big of an issue. Sure people would've complained about it, but those that didn't want to pay would've been able to get their stuff off of photobucket's servers and completely eliminated the bandwidth usage. Everyone would have said that it was a crappy thing to have happen but what can you do, it's their business. Instead they set a firestorm with their terrible choice of action and are going to be hurt far more than they realize until it's too late (which it pretty much already is).

How would you feel if Google or Yahoo or whoever you have as a free email account provider just up and told you "Shucks, we're losing money on you so until you pay us several hundred dollars RIGHT NOW you can't access any of your emails and no one can send you anything more either."?

I'm an admin for a webhosting company and I can tell you, this move is a complete $#!& move on their part. Yes, bandwidth costs money, running a business costs money, etc, etc. But when you've built up your business on the premise of offering a free service as Photobucket did and then yank that out from under everyone simply because you weren't paying attention to your margins or suddenly got greedy? How is that ever an OK thing to do? Any idiot with a brain knows that's a very poor business choice. Sure, you don't have to always offer it for free, but if you're going to switch to a paid platform 100%, then you HAVE to give your customers time to transition or leave. That is not only the polite thing to do, but it is also going to give you the greatest return as you will get more people to sign up for the service when offering a transition (like offering a special price for the first year to people who sign up before a certain deadline) as opposed to simply shutting EVERYONE off and then demanding an obscene amount of money upfront. A good portion of your customers that might've stayed with a more well thought out transition are going to just up and leave due to the terrible treatment. And guess what? They've already invested in all that hardware and ISP connections to handle the load. Their margins are going to be thinner now since they'll probably end up with a lot of unused/underutilized hardware and staff that they are probably going to struggle with gaining enough income again to justify keeping it. More wasted money because of a stupid choice made by some greedy CEO. The only thing that will drop is bandwidth usage, but I doubt that will be enough to offset the losses they are and will incur due to this action.
 

MixManSC

Member
Messages
19
Location
SC
Oh I absolutely agree it was a totally sh87tty way for them to do it. Just overnight and bam, forums all over the internet suddenly have linked images broken everywhere. It has already screwed me up a couple of time when searching for pics of something someone else has done that I wanted to use as a reference so I could do the same mods. I pretty much agree with your entire post..... they have essentially screwed themselves. No amount of good will at this point will undo the harm that they have already done to themselves by just abruptly cutting it off the way they did. I think had they given plenty of advance notice and thoughtfully explained their reasons for needing to start charging and offered some reasonably prices plans they likely would have had a gold mine.
 

3Hummers

Super Moderator
Staff member
Messages
10,398
Location
Central Texas
Short answer is there is a right way and a wrong way to conduct business. Photobucket chose the wrong way. After the dust settles they will have a fraction of the customers. Huge numbers of account holders they could have captured with a reasonable approach will never trust them again. They deserve every bit of hurt they are going to feel. The executives that hatched this hair brained scheme have likely already updated their resumes knowing the board is going to fire them.
 

SuperBuickGuy

Well-Known Member
Messages
3,403
Location
Woodinville, WA
Where is the $400 pricing coming from. You had me worried, but my photobucket account is $60 a year. I may start using other services, but I'm curious if I'm missing a big picture...
 

JPaul

Well-Known Member
Messages
2,400
Location
Way up north, UT
Where is the $400 pricing coming from. You had me worried, but my photobucket account is $60 a year. I may start using other services, but I'm curious if I'm missing a big picture...
Everything I've read is they updated their TOS with new plans and the only plan now that allows embedding your photos in websites and forum posts is the $400 a year one. Anything below that doesn't allow it. But they probably went after the free accounts first.

I'm willing to bet their next step was originally to start going after the ones that already pay but are the lower cost accounts. They might be rethinking that approach now though.

I've heard of a number of others that already were paying various amounts due to storage needs or whatever that still have their images working.

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f5moab

Mr. Beretta
Messages
1,986
Location
Hiding in a potato patch in Idaho
They didn't go after all free accounts, yet. I can still post. However, I have verified I have all the photos I have on Photobucket, if not downloading them and slowly migrating the photos to another site. When Photobucket cuts the links if someone needs to see the photos on that thread, and I'm notified, I will repost If not, I really don't care.:giggle:

school%20bus%20blowup_zpsmujmnctu.jpg~original


As of today, mine are still linked....I wonder for how long?
 
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