Just noticed that on a few forums that all photobucket images have been replaced with a symbol saying that people should upgrade accounts for 3rd party image hosting. Seems reasonable at first glance I guess, perhaps a small one off payment to remove the shocking amount of advertising and retain that feature? Well here's the rub, they've pretty much killed their own website by demanding $399 / year Yep, the only option within the upgrade paths to retain 3rd party image hosting will cost users $399 a year. I'm actually a bit embarrassed I missed it but it seems to have been a targeted roll out going for big services users first and then down to the small users like me / us http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40492668 Needless to say that it's killed 100,000's of build threads, tech help threads, ride outs, everything. People are trying to download their album's on mass, just trying to get mine out of there now and it's crawling speed wise. Luckily I've got most of them spread across iCloud backups and Google photos, but it's still a monumental pain in the ass for all the people who now have to relink images to older threads. I might sound a little pessimistic, but I would honestly say that it's unlikely they'll survive this so i'd highly recommend getting all images downloaded from there as soon as you can. Anyone got any recommendations for a site similar which offers 3rd party image hosting?
If Facebook offered 3rd party image hosting then that would be a new feature so yeah I guess they could charge. Do you happen to know what other sites like photobucket there are? Seems a few people are suggesting imgur but I don't know whether that works in the same way. Forums such as this need the ability to link images through so there must be something decent on the horizon. It's just such a bizarre commercial decision imo Yes offer a paid service and move 3rd party hosting ability to a 2nd tier, but at $400 a year it's almost ransom like or some self destruction tactic Even if you said £20/year it would still net them millions, but judging by the online backlash accounts are being closed and images moved on a massive scale, surely spelling the end of photobucket
Why? I have never seen the need for Photobucket and the like - why do you need to link to such sites - never understood this and why people needed it. But I'm no technophobe
I've never felt the need either. I do post pics up on FB for friends and family but I also keep a copy on my hard drive and also a separate drive as a back up. Not that I take that many pics anyhow.
In the olden days many forums really struggled with hosting/posting pics, they were very limited on space. The forum would reject the image if too large. The only way to display a decent image was to host it on a pic site and link to the forum, or shrink the original down to a size (usually bloody tiny) acceptable to the forum site.
Ah, I wasn't on any olden day Forums - that explains it. Anyhoo - a thing of the past - good riddance
And this is exactly why the move from Photobucket will cause problems for forums. Because photobucket was so popular, a huge amount of blogs and forum threads have pictures within them that are / were hosted by photobucket. This forum will have loads. Those pictures will now disappear or at least be replaced by an image of photobucket saying that the user has to upgrade the account ($400) So it's not a matter of worry on this site today because images of a decent size can be uploaded, but others sites don't allow that and also possibly millions of threads throughout the Internet now have missing images because of the move they've made. It'll make certain help threads and build threads obsolete.
Sometimes the account holder will also delete from the hosting site. This also causes the image to disappear from forums etc.
Any publicly available URL should work. A link to an image in the public folder of your Dropbox (free) should do the job.
The UK monster owners club site is currently being ruined by this. http://www.ukmonster.co.uk/monster/index.php On there you simply cannot upload an image to their servers at all, so a huge proportion of the old threads have images 3rd party hosted by photobucket, including a lot of my own. I'd be very interested to hear of any similar sites that are still free to use, as I've given up posting on the monster site, particularly posting parts for sale, as it's almost impossible to post an image at the moment. Nasher
Not effected too much on this forum. I anticipated something like this happening, so I got a plugin that imports externally hosted images and puts them on my server. Should be fine here!
If @Exige , you advertise something on gumtree, pistonheads or ebay etc that only allow 12 pictures or so, then it was an easy way of providing a link to many more photos. Photobucket is now crap, slow and near useless, but thats what I used it for on the past.
So 3rd party linked images auto import to the forum? That's great if it does, top job I don't care about photobucket or whatever commercial decision they take, it's more the years of threads which people put so much time in to being wiped out just like that
Yes, any linked images import I also manually imported all of the images prior to me installing this add-on about a month ago, so any Photobucket images that were linked have been imported to the forum.
