Well, my bandwidth has been exceeded for the very first time since I started heavily using it a year ago. Surprised that it happened half-way through the measuring cycle, as well. My pics must be getting very popular or our membership has exploded and the extra views have eaten through my photobucket bandwidth.
I purchased the lowest upgrade to get my pics back online and my account settings show the increase in storage has been applied but my pics are still not available even though it says my bandwidth is now unlimited. I cleared out my cache and tried a different browser as well but they are still locked down. I submitted a support ticket with PB but have to wait for them to reply to me.
Has any of you had to buy the upgrade package to get your photos back online and how long should it take from your experience?
Wow! Kudos to Photobucket and their support team. They actually answer their tickets really fast. I should have my pics back up very soon.
Thanks for your Plus subscription!
I apologize for the delay in resetting your bandwidth. There was an issue with one of our servers last night that was affecting a few dozen users.
I checked out your account, and it looks like you're right. I escalated this and I'll have an update for you ASAP. We are working on it at this very moment.
For a start there’s the new look - which gets in my way every time I try to achieve something - which is now rammed down my throat even though I’ve turned it off every time they’ve turned it back on without my consent.
And with the new look it is not possible to find out how much bandwidth you’ve actually used.
And now they want to charge for disk space and are pushing a tool that’ll automatically search out any and all pics (you get no choice on what it uploads) - and uploads them at full resolution which is not helpful for anyone using a memory-constrained machine (Which more than one well-respected member here does). If it had uploaded every pic it could find on this box I’d be paying for 60-80 gigabytes of storage Which would add $100 a year to the cost. That application hit the bit-bucket really fast. I really don’t think anyone other than me would be interested in 4000 dpi mono scans of 100 year old prints. And there are 50 gigs of those.
I can understand their charging for disk space and am OK with that. I get 20 gigs on top of what’s already there. And can’t see myself ever filling that as there’s no need to upload full-resolution images anywhere. Which will get grabbed and used inappropriately.
I am not OK with their attempt to be some sort of Facebook clone (There’s Flickr for that already) or their useless interface - the previous one wasn’t pretty but got the job done.
/rant
Not apparently if you are giving them money. I used to be able to see how much bandwidth in total I was using, which pictures were using it, and where they were linked from. This stuff is useful and is not now available.
What frustrates me about PB is that if I upload a large image and resize it in their editor (which is not an easy one-click action), the initial image will be cached on their servers for what seems to be days if not longer. I end up having to copy the image and delete the original one so that everyone will see the smaller image.
I used to use Picasa, but since it has been integrated with Google+ it's not really meant to be a hosting site like PB is.
It most certainly isn’t. Nor is it that easy short of viewing Every. Single. Image. One. At. A. £$&$ Time. to find out how big the images are. I resized around a gigabyte of images that way.
I quite rapidly ran out of swear words. And combinations of two of them - think I was up to combinations of four of them by the time I’d downsized all of the images.
LOL, exactly what I think when I clicking through each one. I normally just use an image resizer for Windows, but if I upload from my phone directly to PB there's no ability to resize on the fly. And if I load them off of my camera into Picasa, I have to use the Export function to resize them (which creates another set of files that I can then upload to PB). Ugh.
What are they thinking? If it were free I could understand it but I’ve been giving them money to host my images for about 4 years now. Time to look at the HK or Chinese hosting companies - latency and data rate will suck but if PB continue to monetise their customer base and dumb down their offering - I’ll roll my own and host it in Asia for less money.
I don’t actually need anything more than a completely dumb repository for my images that’ll serve them up at a reasonable rate and as much reporting as they’ll allow (are able to supply) me to have.
I have exactly no wish to replicate the Facebook “experience”. If I wish to bend over int he showers in a Federal prison I’ll get myself sentenced there. Since I don’t - I’ll use other means to serve up my pics. If my ISP were a little less incompetent (no servers. At all), I’d host them from home.
Well, never fear. The rest of the photo sites are going to change too. I see that image shack is going to update and I read that another some other sites are too. It's all going to touch screen style. The wave of the future. Loose those old computer screens, you need to be rubbing your tablet screen and putting your sticky fingers all over it. Whooppee! Wait till every 15 year old gets to be 30 and has severe carpal tunnel from all that touch screen crap. It will happen...
It stinks, I'm old and I do not want to change again. When I can no longer navigate with my mouse and keyboard, I am going to drop the internet once and for all. It took me a long time to accept the internet and computers, now I have to spend hundreds on wireless and carry some tablet with me? Not!.....
I have to keep my photos on PB for now, but when I'm tired of flashlights, I'm going to just let that site lapse and any other site that goes to "storytelling" and scripts that lock up my PC. Tell a story my arse!
I’m probably younger than you (I’m 52) and feel exactly the same way. And stories are what pays the mortgage. But the day I want a hosting company (which is all I want photobucket (and you have no idea how much I want to replace one of those letters with one four letters farther along the alphabet) to be) to become a social network is the day I’ll give up and cut my throat. What I want PB or any such site to do is to serve up pictures. Nothing else.
If they don’t want to do that. Fine. I’ll move all the pics to somewhere that does. Or host them somewhere that doesn’t care what the bytes they dish out are.
If I want to tell stories (Which is what my crappy income gets paid to me for) I’ll expect my usual hourly rate. Which is a bit (i.e., infinitely) more than PB pay me. I pay them. Which is not going to continue unless they get their heads out of where they are currently stuck.
I pay them - if I didn’t well that’d be different. But I’ve given them money for several years. They clearly don’t want that money because I don’t care if every image link I’ve ever posted dies. Others may do. But i still have the originals. I don’t care if every forum on the planet loses my pics. The forums I care about will get new links.
People do that. I have a buddy that has two accounts, used a promo code to get a discount on both. Not hard to do, if they go by email, people have multiple emails(I have probably like 4 or 5 myself, some I made some just came with services I already had).
