Author Topic: End of Photobucket  (Read 3767 times)

Offline Rusty Shackleford

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End of Photobucket
« on: July 01, 2017, 09:21:41 AM »
I was curious if anyone else had felt the impact of Photobucket's recent changes and what image hosting services you use instead.

For those who don't know, Photobucket is(was) a website where you could upload photos, get a link to that photo, and then display that pic on another site with that link (like here). This was the point of Photobucket since the early days (mid 2000s at least), but suddenly on a dime they ended these links and want $399US annual fee from a user to restore the links.

I think Photobucket had a terrible business model because I couldn't see how they got revenue, but it persisted so I didn't care. If they want to end hotlinking that's their prerogative, but to remain a viable business they handled this change in the worst possible way: no warning, no gradual reduction in features, and people are getting the impression their photos are being held for ransom. Users cannot even log in to download their pics, supposedly they remain allowed to do so, but the site is so notoriously buggy that it's hard to say if they really are holding the pics for ransom or if they just can't get the feature to work.

I was unable to find any of my own posts that still showed a pic.


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Offline Razor X

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Re: End of Photobucket
« Reply #1 on: July 02, 2017, 08:16:38 AM »
I wasn't aware of any of this.  The mobile app was always horrible so I haven't relied on it as much as I used to.  I mainly used it for posting pics to this Andy one or two other sites.  I looked into switching to something else a few times but it was such a hassle I didn't seriously pursue it.  I'm not going to pay them any money.  Should look and see what I have out there that I don't want to lose.

Offline Hingatao

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Re: End of Photobucket
« Reply #2 on: July 03, 2017, 02:42:57 PM »
I've used photobucket once or twice myself and that was to post links here on SBG not long after I joined. I don't remember being too impressed with it. It's certainly not something I'd ever pay to use.
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Offline Rusty Shackleford

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Re: End of Photobucket
« Reply #3 on: July 04, 2017, 11:46:24 AM »
I wasn't aware of any of this.  The mobile app was always horrible so I haven't relied on it as much as I used to.  I mainly used it for posting pics to this Andy one or two other sites.  I looked into switching to something else a few times but it was such a hassle I didn't seriously pursue it.  I'm not going to pay them any money.  Should look and see what I have out there that I don't want to lose.

My experience was that the website worked on computers, but was so bloated with ads on mobile it was useless.  In 2015 I got the app and found it worked very well and was very intuitive too, but then last fall they updated the app and ripped out all of its functionality with uploading pics.  To this day the only functionality I could find with the app was in viewing photos that were already on the phone and better viewed with the built-in gallery app anyway.  The website still worked, but I basically stopped uploading pics because of the hassle unless the site had its own embedded hosting like Facebook.

This is also ignoring the fact that the site has been down routinely over the past couple years in regards to uploading photos.  Things have become so bad with it I check their Facebook profile once in a while to read the complaints because they become funny.
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Offline Rusty Shackleford

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Re: End of Photobucket
« Reply #4 on: July 04, 2017, 02:59:36 PM »
I wasn't aware of any of this.
...

I just flipped through the beard thread to see if my pics were affected, and they are gone.  I also noticed that your posts don't work either.
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Offline Tyler

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Re: End of Photobucket
« Reply #5 on: August 18, 2017, 03:25:32 AM »
I implemented https://postimages.org/ on SBG and also use it for other sites to hotlink to images that I want to share.

You can also use it by clicking on "Add image to post" below the text box when adding a new post or replying to a post.
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