Photobucket wants money or else
 

https://www.ghacks.net/2017/06/30/ph...hosted-images/

Dear Photobucket, we have had some great times over the years, but due to this latest development, our relationship must come to a close. I tolerated your increasing greed and progressively unkept appearance, but today's decision means you are no longer the website I came to love all those years ago. I wish you all the best, but I fear you are on a path to self-destruction.

Yup definitely a gear grinder. I am also done with them. Was able to save 70 out of 700 photos. The remaining 630 are being held hostage unless I pay. I guess I'm venturing into Facebook and/or Instagram land now. How about yourself?

I really like Flickr and Deviantart and have used them for years but for a much different purpose of showcasing certain images I draw or scan rather than just having a repository ready for convenient linking. I primarily used Photobucket for all images of that nature on these forums, and it's too bad that a number of great old Drome threads are now mostly worthless because of Photobucket's business strategy.

I don't use a smart phone, so I probably can't make any use of instagram but maybe imgur or something like that can suit my needs.

Yes very unfortunate about the past threads. Imgur might be something I check out as well. Not to sound overly dramatic but losing the past threads is kind of like having a library burn to the ground. It's great to have TMNT fandom throughout the years archived and preserved in some way.

I have fifty-six pages to go through if I want to save the images that have now been doomed to being hidden, and even still, I have to remember which image is which on the most ancient of my art threads, if I can even remember where they've all been posted.

How much of Photobucket's image sharing is even used for third party? The vast majority of it? They're seriously shooting themselves in the foot here. No one is going to shell out $400 a year to keep their images up.

Between this, Verizon's new ownership of Tumblr that will lock out emails registered under competing companies, and the sh*tstorm with the FCC on Net Neutrality (which is, guess what, run by a former Verizon CEO), I'm seriously upset at what's going on with internet services this year.

Great...Might have to check my photobuckets...yes I have 2...and see what's what.

Haha, I used two as well!

I think there is some truth to that. In fact, Photobucket even called accounts "Library." Folks today think digital resources are permanent, but everything is dependent on the good graces of websites and repositories to maintain the services they offer.

I think I'm just count most of my links as a deductible loss.

I have a photobucket account from like 2005 I haven't checked in a decade, lol.

If their hope is to gain some extra pennies out of this, it's safe to say this'll fall right on their face.

$400 bucks a year just to embed pictures from their website onto other sites? Are they out of their everloving minds? Who in the hell is going to pay this?

Dumb. Can just pay $10 a month for an unlimited space server and upload and share all the pictures you want, anywhere.

Good thing we have other sites like Imgur.

I switched to imgur a long, long time ago. I even paid for a premium membership with them, but then they went full-on free.

Heh, I thought that was a typo and they meant $39.99 a year instead of $399 a year, and even then I thought $40 a year would be too much.

Let alone $400. :lol:

Does this affect everyone? The chart in this post of mine from a few days ago is an image hosted on my photobucket account but isn't affected. Or am I not seeing it?

It takes some time for some of them to set in. Yesterday, my signature was showing, but today it isn't. And it isn't showing anything on my art threads.

From paid-free sounds a lot better than free-paid. Did you get any type of refund and are you satisfied with imgur?
From what I have been observing, more and more people slowly started losing photos one by one and then in chunks. It wasn't an all or nothing all at once type of thing.

So the big question is, will an uproar either shut them down or force them to go back to the previous system? A shutdown would end up being worse because then everything will be gone.

Are they seriously not letting people access their own stuff??

Tried to check, but still trying to remember my login...

I'm just downloading my whole album...

You could reset password and that might work.

But yes I am serious about not being able to access my photos. I use the app on my phone. Last night I started saving my photos from my bucket back onto my phone. This way when I find a new service I have all my photos ready. When I got to around image 70 I started getting that "please update your account" image that you see all over the place. Tried again this morning and now it blocks me at image 32 of 700.

I can only view my photos in smaller thumbnails and can't open them to save. When I click to open the upgrade image pops up.

I'm open to ideas for getting my complete bucket full of photos back on my phones camera roll.

Been sick of their BS forever. Good riddance. I'm glad they did this, now I won't have to deal with other people's crappily hosted content. :tlol: It's been difficult to save archived TMNT material on there for a year or two now.

Switch to Imgur, they rule!

I still have access to my account...but also don't have a lot of photos either...

Photobucket really is from the ancient days of the internet, just barely ahead of geocities, tripod sites, and myspace. It feels like all these old sites that were around in the late 90's or early 2000's are finally going belly up.

Now to wait for Yahoo to finally fall.

People still used photobucket? Thought it had stopped being the number 1 choice around 2011 or so? Not even sure if I still have my account there or deleted, but it was mostly funny animated gifs that I had uploaded there iirc, so meh.

Never made an account on imgur, since it doesn't require an account to host images on.

Geocities... so many pages me and others made there. I think it was thanks to geocities that I've found out how to unlock SSB Melee characters and also how I've learned about the Missingno glitch on Pokémon Red. That website gave me and many others the illusion of having our own website(s). That was before front page was a thing. What kind of software do people use to make their websites nowadays, anyway?

I used yahoo's search bar until 2003 or so when I finally switched to google permanently. Google wasn't very well liked by many at first because it gave more vague and general results that simply what you were looking for. Yahoo search I assume uses google's search system now, no? Also, remember when Yahoo messenger was a thing before MSN's? What does Yahoo even do nowadays? Report news? Do people use yahoo mail still?

Thanks for the heads up, I also have a photobucket account that I stopped using probably over ten years now but it should have some pictures I want to archive. Photobucket is doing this out of desperation I'm guessing so it's probably not paranoia to think that they'll either start charging to use your pictures even on their own site or for them to just randomly shut down without notice to archive your stuff. So yeah, I'd get archiving your accounts.

I mostly use imgur these days and before that I don't remember what I used but those services ended up sucking so I kept switching. I'm sure one day Imgur will suck but as of now it's great.


The depressed Sonic the Hedgehog signature I used in the drome when I first registered for the drome used to be hosted in photobucket :lol:

Space Jam holds the line.
https://www.warnerbros.com/archive/s.../movie/jam.htm

MySpace is mid/late 00's, it's even referenced in Iron Man instead of Facebook since it was still much bigger :lol:

Yahoo has been dying slowly for a decade, right now it really is dying, they just got bought out by Verizon though the brand will continue for the foreseeable future but Yahoo as an entity is long gone.

It was side when homestead/tripod and angelfire died, a lot of great small fan sites went out with them. My first site I ever made was a homestead site, I also used tripod. I never liked geocities and angelfire. At least geocities seems to be going strong. WHen those free website providers go down we lose a piece of history. Imagine if wordpress.com took down all the free blogs, we'd lose a decade worth of fan content.

That website should live on forever.

Geocities going strong? Didn't it shut down around 2009 or something?!

Pretty sure not so long ago I still saw some broken images with the tripod logo on it.

Blogs? Those were mostly a thing in 2005-2010 or so, I think.

Man, that's awfully low of them to do that.
I feel for anyone who lost all their important photos.

As others have mentioned, Imgur is great. I use it and I highly recommend it. The mobile version is really easy to use, and the desktop version has lots of very useful options.

Site has always been subpar at best, good riddance.

Imgur is still pretty OK but they're already playing around with dumb stuff that's going to make for a worse user experience probably so be aware of that. Changing image hosts is just something you have to do every so many years online, in my experience. Imgur must be like at least my 4th site I've had to jump ship to because the previous one decided to do something dumb.

No matter what you use, I suggest ShareX, it makes stuff incredibly convenient.

I flitted between Photobucket and Imageshack for a long time based on whatever needs I had but I ended up going to Flickr pretty much exclusively because it gives you a terabyte free. I'm sure someone else does now too but at the time they were the only one that gave more than a laughable amount without having to pay.

Geocities? Fortunecity was the sh*t. In the best possible way. At a certain point in time, Geocities gave you like 10 megs... and Fortunecity gave you like 20. Maybe it was 50. That was a huge deal. Then it became a weird war between them. Geocities had annoying popups, but Fortunecity had a static banner on all of your pages.

The funniest part of it all is most people don't even make their own fansites anymore. Now people just turn their tumblr into their own fansites for whatever it is they like.

It actually blows my mind the people who used to spend hours and hours making and creating their own fansites in the early 2000's, and paying a fortune in some cases, whereas nowadays you can just use tumblr and have a free fansite for whatever you want it to be.

The teens of today have it really easy compared to our generation. They'll never know what it was like with a 56k modem and the pre-youtube days when you had to watch videos on quicktime or realplayer. Waiting 1 hour for a 10 minute video to buffer. *shudders*

I really miss that. It really showed people's creativity. Every site, however crude, seemed really "hand-crafted," as opposed to what you see now. I liked it when the "Ring of Green" was a thing in the fandom.

tumblr and most wordpress blogs are the equivalent of old fansites whether you like it or not, so they still exist.


I invented tabbed browsing before tabbed browsing was even a thing back when I had 56k. Using AOL/ Compuserve / earthlink, I aligned each browser window from perfectly so that it had a clickable spot and I could switch windows all from the same "browser" thing that those services used to have. that I could "tab" between them and not have to switch screens, I was able to have like 3 or 4 "browsers in the same window that i clicked through.

I especially did this to save time , I would click a link on one "tab" and then go to the other one that had a loaded page, when I finished reading and made another click, I'd click back to the other one that now had a loaded page. All of this is irrelevant now that we have broadband and I've had broadband for quite a while I was one of the first in my city to have it, I think I got it around 2002.

I think 56k also helped me shape my musical taste, you really had to listen to the track you downloaded because downloading another would take a long ass time so you would learn to appreciate what you had and maybe change your opinion. Nowadays with all the music available to me at all times I dismiss songs that before I would've given a few more listens before saying that it sucked.

Geocities still exists? :teek: Albeit, according to Wikipedia, only in Japan.

My first little site ever existed with them. Back when people had the patience and drive to learn at least a little self-taught HTML. If you wanted to turn your text blue, dammit you had to go figure how the right tags to do it with; none of this built in site-maker stuff. I remember looking at the source info on sites trying to see how someone did something, did a lot of that to learn how.

Never quite noticed fan sites have fallen by the wayside, but now that you guys mention it... yeah, the easiest options just taking over. :ohwell: At least MySpace was more customizeable; made me sad when FB took over. (edit: I see now it offers login via Facebook now... that's just sad.)

Imgur is the place to go to image hosting nowadays, I remember a time when imageshack.com used to allow image hosting, then they stopped doing it by forcing you to pay for its service.

I still can't believe AOL, aka America online still exists. I remember that from like back in 1998.

Do they still do the, "You got mail!" thing from like 15 years ago?

My dad is a stubborn old guy so his (aka my family home, parents divorced) internet is still AOL even though some services would probably be cheaper. It's still dial-up, too.

YEP. :lol: