Photobucket's Epic Fail

[Marcus Rowland]

If anyone hasn't already noticed, Photobucket have decided to disable off-site links unless you pay a fairly large fee, about $400 a year for the most expensive level of their professional hosting service. As a result more and more users are suddenly finding that the photos they've previously posted are being blocked - the only way to see them is to go to Photobucket. Which is bad enough, but it looks like quite a few people can't get them to work in photobucket either because of all the pop ups etc.

Funnily enough the most common reaction seems to be to find another photo hosting service.

I'm in the process of sorting this out for my own photos, but it will probably take a while. Meanwhile my apologies since some of the images I've posted are now showing Photobucket's error message.

[Anthony]

Make life hard for your customers.

An excellent business strategy.  Not.

[David H. Hartman]

I'm sorry to read this. I don't like to see a business shoot itself in the foot.

Dave

As I read it free accounts loose 3rd party hosting now. Plus accounts loose 3rd party hosting at the end of the year. There after only Plus 500 accounts will have 3rd party hosting for $399.99 (USD)/year. This seem pretty steep to me: four hundred frog skins or nothing!

[pluton]

It is clear that posting photos via links to Flickr, Photobucket, etc is a poor long-term strategy. Good looking but modestly sized JPEGs can be posted direct to Nikongear.net and will remain visible long into the future, regardless of the business developments at the hosting services.

[Mike G]

Keith is quite correct and posting images as an attachment is so easy and much less faffing around!

[Fons Baerken]

From what i understand attachments take longer to load and not unimportant tax the server.

[Ethan]

If anyone hasn't already noticed, Photobucket have decided to disable off-site links unless you pay a fairly large fee, about $400 a year for the most expensive level of their professional hosting service. As a result more and more users are suddenly finding that the photos they've previously posted are being blocked - the only way to see them is to go to Photobucket. Which is bad enough, but it looks like quite a few people can't get them to work in photobucket either because of all the pop ups etc.

Funnily enough the most common reaction seems to be to find another photo hosting service.

I'm in the process of sorting this out for my own photos, but it will probably take a while. Meanwhile my apologies since some of the images I've posted are now showing Photobucket's error message.

As usual I don't get it in spite of drinking many different Kool-Aid drinks.

Please explain to me in a way children would understand:

- Why are you apologizing for images you allegedly posted here although you never posted any images?

- Why are you knocking Photobucket as I have just checked and everything is working perfectly including images links???

- I don't get it. Please enlighten me and all members.

[Øivind Tøien]

--snip--
- Why are you knocking Photobucket as I have just checked and everything is working perfectly including images links???

- I don't get it. Please enlighten me and all members.

May be this screenshot can enlighten you:
(There could be that you see images cached on your computer.)

[David H. Hartman]

It is clear that posting photos via links to Flickr, Photobucket, etc is a poor long-term strategy.

Photos posted from Flickr work fine until: until you update the photo. Then your link is broken. If you know where you posted a photo you can correct the problem. If not a generic, "You ain't nowhere" image appears and you look like a fool which in my case is how I should look. 

Now that Marissa Mayer is history and Verizon owns Flickr what are the chances that Flickr will want five hundred frog skins for third party hosting?

Dave

[Marcus Rowland]

As usual I don't get it in spite of drinking many different Kool-Aid drinks.

Please explain to me in a way children would understand:

- Why are you apologizing for images you allegedly posted here although you never posted any images?

- Why are you knocking Photobucket as I have just checked and everything is working perfectly including images links???

- I don't get it. Please enlighten me and all members.

Some others have already shown you what happens to most photobucket hosted links these days. They seem to have gone after the high-bandwidth users first, but people with relatively low bandwidth and space used (such as me) are now being hit. For my part, I thought I'd posted a few pictures here related to technical and DIY stuff, but it may have been nikonforums instead.

Now I really need to get back to work on tracking down the pages that have links to the thousand or so images I have on Photobucket, and decide what to do about them. In a lot of cases (e.g. most of my older blog posts) it will probably end up being too much trouble to sort it out. But I've got a lot of stuff where the illos are still needed, and it is a total PITA sorting it out.

[Ron Scubadiver]

Huge threads in other forums have been ruined by this bad move by Photobucket.

[pluton]

Ron, I've noticed them all over the web.
I went back and replaced my Flickr-linked shots with attachments.  Easy for me, since there are only a handful.

[David H. Hartman]

With little emotion I just deleted my PhotoBucket account. They wanted a reason so I selected "Other" and wrote: "PLEASE UPDATE YOUR ACCOUNT TO ENABLE 3RD PARTY HOSTING." PhotoBucket won't notice I'm missing. I won't either.

[richardHaw]

yeah...photobucket killed the internet (OK, just a bit)

[Marcus Rowland]

Forgot to mention this - a few days ago Denver's Better Business Bureau dropped Photobucket's rating to F, the lowest they do, citing fifteen complaints since they changed their terms and no response from the company.

https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2017/09/13/photobucket.html?ana=twt

What a surprise...