For those not familiar with it, Photobucket is a website allowed you to upload photos to share them with other people. It’s been a (mostly) free site paid for by revenue generated by ads you see whilst you’re uploading. Well, lately there’ve been so many pop-ups I thought maybe I’d wandered into a Russian porn site by mistake.
Now, what they’ve done is to say that you can’t embed images on another website unless you have a paid account at $400 a year. Now, I don’t use it enough to justify that kind of payment and I’m guessing that most users don’t either, but in a supremely dickish move, they’ve applied this decision retroactively thereby breaking links to probably thousands of pictures on hundreds of websites from car buffs to gun nuts to film freaks to model maniacs to quilters.
Well, I never trusted “the cloud” enough to put anything on there that I didn’t keep on my own hard drive, but I’m sure others have and I’m hearing stories that they can’t even get in to recover their own pictures.
I know it’s their site and they can do what they want, but how about a miniscule amount of consideration. After this, you’ll be lucky if the people who might have paid a more modest fee, perhaps based on actual usage rather than one size fits nobody, don’t raise their collective middle fingers to you and go elsewhere.
Didn’t know about the ton of ads but I noticed a while back you can no longer view it with an ad blocker active. Too bad, I have tons of photos there for quite a few years back.
I’ve been meaning to leave photobucket for a while. A single pop up when I go to the site, I can deal with. My real problem is their mobile app. Each time you move from one page to the next as you scroll through you’re gallery, you get the pop-up again. That’s annoying, but what really kills me is that their app no longer supports the ability to upload pictures. All the app does is show you the pictures on your phone. It doesn’t let you upload them, it doesn’t let you access the ones on your account. It’s, literally, nothing more than a (phone) photo gallery. It’s totally useless.
I’m not sure what or where I should go. Imgur, flickr, somewhere else?
Two things I’d really like, if I make the move, are something to migrate all my pictures over. I don’t mind having a pseudo-backup. That is, leaving what I have on photobucket, there, but I’d still like to have them on the new site as well.
Second, I’d love a way to link to pictures in such a way that didn’t give the viewer(s) access to my entire account (same for youtube). That is, if I link to a picture in a thread here, all you have to do is delete some of the URL or in some cases click a few buttons on the picture and you have access to everything I’ve ever uploaded. I’ve always thought that was poor planing…or not planning if linking to pictures on public forums wasn’t the original intent, but something they could or should have implemented.
Hadn’t been on it in a couple of months but recall being severely annoyed with it at the time. Since I haven’t used it, I took the steps today to delete all of my pictures and then delete the account.
Maybe Photobucket used to be a site where you could upload pictures for others to see, but it’s not any more. Now, it’s a site where you can upload pictures and others can see ads. And behind the ads, there are more ads. And maybe, if you’re lucky, a large enough proportion of those ads will have “close” buttons that actually work that you’ll be able to see part of a picture behind them.
Ads to support content, I can tolerate. Ads replacing content, I can’t.
Unfortunately, I think this move would make it difficult to import Photobucket images to any other site, since they would not be able to get the image directly.
As for Imgur vs. Flickr, it depends on what you want. Imgur is low frills, but it allows you to upload anonymously, and thus absolutely no way to link back to other images you’ve submitted. It also has an option to not publish your image, which means that the only way to get access to the image is through a direct link to the page or image. Unfortunately, I’ve never bothered to make an account there, so I don’t know how things change if you do have an account. But my understanding is that only images you choose to publish will be available on your profile page.
Flickr is fancier but slower loading. It gives you licensing options, unlike Imgur which basically has the SDMB license–they have permission to use whatever images you post there for whatever reason. This makes them more popular among people who just share photos, while Imgur is more popular among people who share all sorts of images. I believe you can also limit what resolution people are allowed to download.
Personally, I like just using Imgur. I don’t even bother having an account, as I said above. I keep all my images on my hard drive, so I don’t even keep track of the URLs of what I upload. If I wanted to keep track, I’d create an account.
If I were a professional photographer, then I would use Flickr.
Flickr gives you quite a bit of control over what people can see. You can create temporary links, for example.
Furthermore, (just in case this applies to you), Flickr is the ONLY photo-sharing website that I know of that is committed to principles of free speech.
Whereas Flickr allows all of that. It just has to be categorized properly.
This example is pretty mild for Flickr, but most sites wouldn’t allow this picture.
I’m not sure if you’ve used photobucket before, but there’s a button to download a picture right there. After downloading it locally, I can do with it as I please, such as uploaded it to another photohosting site.
I’m not sure I understand why a program (think: macro), couldn’t handle that on it’s own. It seems like it would be a great idea for one of the other photo hosting sites to make one. It would just work though all your pictures and transfer them to it’s own site. Doesn’t really seem like a big deal…I just don’t care to do it on my own.
There’s a lot of people disgruntled with PB, especially since the rollout of the new app. I think people would leave in droves if it wasn’t for their hundreds or thousands of pictures holding them back.
Wouldn’t it be nice if imgur or flicr or whatever else is out there that was free ran a ‘special’ saying ‘join now and we’ll import all your photobucket pictures and videos for free’.
I suppose there is the chance that after enough people do this PH would put a stop to it, but that’s a topic for another discussion.
Well, if I use imgur anonymously, I can’t keep them together (right, you mean without having an account). So that wouldn’t help me much.
As for not linking back to me, one of the things I get concerned about is personal information. For example, I may want to link to a picture of some dogs, so I upload them to PB, link to them here (or wherever), but forgot that years ago I also uploaded a receipt with my name and address. When you link to a photobucket picture, the URL is something like photobucket . com/joeyp/uploads/jm33olx0.jpg. Most people have figured out that that all they need to do is back off the last part and they have access to my account. ISTM, that if, for example, the URL was phtobkt . com/jm33olx0.jpg and nothing was on that page other than the one single picture, it would be much harder to find my account, especially if (and I don’t know if this is the case) it wasn’t google indexed so GIS didn’t get you anywhere.
Anyways. I like scrolling though imgur and thought about using it, but it feels like a fad and I’m concerned it could disappear at some point. I never even glanced at flicr so I don’t know anything about it, but I’d be curious about what their future looks like as photobucket keeps falling apart.
[[I really should see if PB gives me the ability to download all (or many) pictures at once. I’ve never downloaded more than one at a time]]
I think I still have my PB account. Had a ton of backgrounds and other photo miscellany stored there dating back to LJ’s heyday. Never used flickr because that’s where the “serious” photo people hung out.
Come to think of it I can’t remember the last time I even linked to any of my stuff from there.
I have used Photobucket, but it’s been a long, long time. From the description in the OP, I assumed that Download buttons were gone (unless you were logged in). Hence any other site would not be able to easily download the image. If they’re still there (but randomly change), it might be possible, but a cursory Google search doesn’t find any automated tools.
I did find, however, information that indicates you can easily download an entire album.
As for Imgur, the way it works is that, if you put an image on the page, it will just work. But if you link to the image, then you’ll be taken to the page that contains the image. And it does have your name on that page, so you can click to see other images. However, I believe you will only see images that you have chosen to “Publish,” which is distinct from uploading. Images are private by default, and only work if you give out the link.
I really don’t see any sign that Imgur is going away. In its 8-year history, it’s basically become the image site used online anymore. It is the 36th most popular website in the world, and 11th in the United States.
Sure, it hosts memes and GIFs. But memes and GIFs are a huge part of the Internet. The ease at which you can share images is its strength, and a lot of why other image hosts aren’t doing so well. They’re being out-competed.
Photobucket is a hot mess, and has been for years. I’d love to move some of my pics I use for hotlinking (my fav smilies, etc) to another provider. Anyone have a competitor in mind that would let me UL my small-ish pics to an album of sorts and then hotlink them?
I would definitely recommend Imgur for your usecase, FILB. It’s great for pics like that, and hotlinking works fine. After the image is uploaded, copy the image URL from your right click menu.
The main reason I brought up Flickr is just ownership of images. If you don’t care about that, then Imgur is the way to go.
Pretty much. I’m always a little surprised when I see a Photobucket link. It’s like seeing someone link to their MySpace account.
I typically just link directly to the image. As in, right click on the image from the Imgur page, select “View Image” and use THAT url for linking or embedding purposes.
They are overcharging people for an inferior service when their competitors aren’t, and they implemented the change in about the worst way they could short of personally mailing insulting emails to everyone. I’d be surprised if this doesn’t basically gut their user base, if not outright destroy them.
This is the kind of extortionate behavior that a company can only get away with when it has such a dominant position that people don’t have the option to just walk away. Not when they are already struggling and being outcompeted by competitors that their customers *can *easily switch to.
