Photobucket Alert

[Dave W]

Within the past day or two, Photobucket has changed its terms of service to block third party hosting unless you upgrade to a $399 per year premium plan. This also means that if you have a free account (as I do) or a lesser premium account, your hotlinked photos in existing posts here will not show up either.

There are other options for photo hosting, of course, but it's really bad that existing images will be blocked. I'm sure not going to go back through 9+ years of posts to replace all the images I've posted.

http://photobucket.com/p500/

At this point IMHO it would be foolish to trust Photobucket with $399. The site probably won't last.

[TBird1958]

Good to know, thank you Dave! 

[gweimer]

Good info.  Thanks.  I use my Photobucket account only for building ebay listings, and most my business now is done on Etsy, so I have little use for it.  Anything I have on Photobucket is already on my external drives and saved somewhere.

[TBird1958]

  This leads me to ask: What other sites are you guys using and having good results with?
I don't mind paying a little, but $400.00 a year?! Ain't happening.

[Granny Gremlin]

If you have your own website ( I know some of you do, for yer biz or whatever), you can use that online space to host yer own pics. You can create a separate subfolder just for such things with lesser security ( still just read only) so as to not compromise the rest of your site.  That's what I do.

Then I have the password protected folders where I share things with e.g. my band or fam that I don't want the whole rest of the Internet to see.

[Pilgrim]

Good idea, Granny G. I own http://colocougs.org and could set up photo hosting for that purpose. I plan to have that site for a long time. I have long been irritated by Hostmonster.com, and am migrating the site to GoDaddy at present. Not sure I will like them better, but every time I have a problem on Hostmonster, I spend an hour with tech support while they tell me why I can't do what I want to do. Hopefully GoDaddy is more responsive and helpful.

I have a LOT of stuff on Photobucket but their site has become increasingly irritating with a deluge of ads that cover content and prevent quick access.  Unfortunately I also have many links to those files.

I guess I'll need to migrate the rest of the stuff to GoDaddy, then add photo hosting.

[chromium]

Photobucket has been a hot mess for a while.  The constant barrage of spam/ads renders it borderline unusable, and I can't see how that would entice anyone to ante up for a paid service.  I suspect they will fade into oblivion with this move, or get bought out for the name and resurrected by someone else.

I switched over to imgur.com, which seems to work well.  Google Photos might be a good alternative too, although I haven't tried it yet (I do like Goolge Drive for cloud storage).

[chromium]

At this very instant, here's what the Photobucket landing page looks like.  LOL




$399/year my a**!

[Dave W]

I should clarify that your photos are still on Photobucket (at least for now), you just can't hotlink/embed on another site. If you can't pay them $399 at one whack, you can pay monthly for only $39.99/mo.    By comparison, plenty of webhosts offer unlimited storage space for well under half of that.

Joe is right, Imgur is free and you can hotlink. I just signed up. Haven't moved anything yet but here's a random Canada Day pic hosted on Imgur.

[Pilgrim]

At this very instant, here's what the Photobucket landing page looks like.  LOL




$399/year my a**!

That's a browser issue, not the site itself - however, it is indeed loaded with ads and very slow to respond. If I can't hotlink to it, I have no use for it.

[bassilisk]

I just signed into imgur and it's a piece of cake to use. Recommended!

Unfortunately all my previous photos have disappeared as the site shut down June 30th.

[Dave W]

That's a browser issue, not the site itself - however, it is indeed loaded with ads and very slow to respond. If I can't hotlink to it, I have no use for it.

No, it's not a browser issue. Looks that way for me in all my browsers. I suspect they may be overloaded from people moving their photos.

I just signed into imgur and it's a piece of cake to use. Recommended!

Unfortunately all my previous photos have disappeared as the site shut down June 30th.

I can't see my previous photos either (they're all on my hard drive anyway) but I was able to log in and the percentage of my capacity in use still shows the same. So I don't think Photobucket has shut down yet. Something's up for sure, though.

[TBird1958]

I've visited porn sites with less invasive ads than Photobucket, thanks for tip on Imgur, I'll check them out tonight.

[Granny Gremlin]

Joe is right, Imgur is free and you can hotlink. I just signed up. Haven't moved anything yet but here's a random Canada Day pic hosted on Imgur.

I hope my efforts to thoroughly smash that stereotype have been successful (sorry).

[bassilisk]

I can't see my previous photos either (they're all on my hard drive anyway) but I was able to log in and the percentage of my capacity in use still shows the same. So I don't think Photobucket has shut down yet. Something's up for sure, though.

Apologies. I was using Imagesomething (it has already escaped me). I went in and got a notice saying they were shutting down end of June, so I cleared it out and closed my account. No big loss since I only use these sites to post bass pics in Forums. It was easy to use though.

So I signed up on Imgur last week and loaded it up for future.

Unfortunately all the links for everything I've posted here so far are broken.