Photobucket images broken, $399 a year!

Some poor folk have got alot of post editing to do.
What the heck were PB thinking of?

If Photobucket think they are going to make money from this exercise I’d suggest to them otherwise. All they are going to achieve is a lot of unhappy customers and trashed forums.
In the early days here it was one of the recommended places to host pictures. Not now.
Get your act together Photobucket. :expressionless:

As unfortunate as it is, it’s not exactly surprising. Bandwidth might be cheap but it’s not free and hotlinking images makes no money for the host (ie. no ads or anything of the sort). They don’t even get visibility as nobody knows where the image comes from. Until it no longer loads anyway, in which case it’s not very good publicity for them :wink:

I stopped using photobucket a while back because it’s slow as s*it. Imgur works for me, and it’s free.

Their original business model was based on allowing hotlinking with advert support for funding it. When you go to upload an image you are exposed to adverts.

Except for a lot of people who have all their pictures on there and will pay $400 so they don’t have to endlessly search the internet to relink all of their pics.
Pretty big scam tbh.

As someone who has a forum (unrelated to ’lights) I am only surprised that it took PB this long to tire of providing free anonymous hosting of images that are only or mainly used to post to forums. Everything costs. I have used them a lot and never contributed a nickle. Perhaps I am partly to blame,but I think I understand the costs they face. No free lunch. Theycould care less about where the images are used.

I went the same way for the same reasons

Another forum I read hasn’t allowed external image links for several years now. You have to upload them to your album on the forum to link them.

He was tired of old posts with broken links.

Not all forum owners / operators can afford to pay for the bandwidth and disk space images use. Don’t have any idea about BLF.

a torrent/audiobook site I frequent seems to host their own pix

butt it’s not small, and it gets support

Hi everyone, this is indeed frustrating, but please avoid swearing and thinly veiled variants of swear words. Thanks in advanced for going back and cleaning things up.

those who use PB will do hell of job to re-link their pictures in case they don’t want to pay $399/ year

Hmm, they just collected my annual fee and my pics are still up. I haven’t received any notice of this.

Deeeeeeeep pockets one must have not to care much about this…

Sorry guys,
I had over 300 pictures on photobucket. Most linked here were in the “Guess the place” thread but there were a few in other posts. All now broken links.

I am NOT going to resurrect them (I have copies).

In future I’ll either use a roll-your-own site on one of my domains, or imgur/abload,
with the understanding that any 3rd party site can disappear (picasa).

I will fix my .sig !

Does anyone use Piwigo ?

I like flickr for this forum…

That might work with low view counts. But it’s not a very reliably model. And it’s still crap that they gave no warning at all.

I agree, and yes, it’s terrible that they didn’t seem to give any warning.