Some years ago I opened a free account with Photobucket and for a while it worked fine. I now ant to recover all of them (several hundred) but I can only download them one at a time.
It seems that if I want whole albums, I have to pay their extortionate fees.
Can anyone help me to get my pictures back without paying the ransom, please?
Did you store the pictures anywhere else?
I have some - most were scanned fro prints anyway, so I could re-scan them. It would just be a lot easier if I could capture the whole folders.
Once you log in, you can go to any of your albums and start selecting the pictures you want to download.
Once you’ve selected a dozen or 20, click the download button and you’ll get a Zip file with the selected pictures. (Selected pictures should outline in blue.)
The Download button looks like an arrow pointing down into a shape like this: |__|
If your pictures aren’t in Albums, just select the first bunch you want to download all at once.
My free version does not have a download button if I select more than one file. I can copy, delete etc, but not dl.
They did this many years ago. I, along with a ton of other people, reported them to the BBB. They kept telling us to use their batch downloader to grab them all but it was always broken. Like you, most of didn’t want to spend weeks downloading all our pictures one by one.
In the end, I (and I think a lot of others) found a batch downloader that sort of worked. I think it took a good couple of hours to download all the pictures and failed a few times, but eventually I got them all.
To make matters worse, at least back then, they only had like 3 people working there. I have to assume their servers were crashing pretty often with everyone trying to download everything all at once. Plus, they were fielding all those emails as well.
What a trainwreck that was.
I don’t recall what the app was and even if I did it probably doesn’t work anymore. However, if you search for photobucket batch downloader, and maybe restrict the results to the last year or so, I assume there’s something still out there that works.
I rescued mine back in 2017 when they went to the pay up or else model. I used a process I found on GitHub. Here’s a link…not sure if this will work for you: Download all your photobucket images in bulk via CLI
I did find a Chrome extension and installed that, but it only works on the paid-for version. I can get a monthly sub for £5.00 but this is a recurring payment and I have no doubt that I would have to jump through hoops to cancel it.
The ‘link’ button is missing.
Looks like I’ll have to plod through and dl them one by one 
I have to go - back later in case anyone has a solution.
My version is the free version, but did you log in successfully? Without logging in I can download 1 at a time, once I log in the steps I wrote up work for me.
You might need to go through a password recovery process if you don’t recall your log in.
Can you view all the images without problem? Do you have access to all of their names (URLs)?
In other words, could you retrieve all of your photos with a sequence of commands like …
urlfetch http://whatever.whatever/bobs_photos/robin.jpg
urlfetch http://whatever.whatever/bobs_photos/eagle.jpg
…
urlfetch http://whatever.whatever/bobs_photos/pasta.jpg
… but you want to avoid the tedium of typing or clicking for each file?
Sometimes the browser’s “Save Webpage, complete” will get a large collection of images. (Perhaps you can also prepare a webpage with all the image URLs and do a “Save Webpage, complete” on it!)
If one of your friends has a computer with an Operating System, you can prepare and execute a script with the appropriate commands on that machine. If instead all you have is Windows, there are programs you can download for free with which you can emulate an Operating System under Windows.
Yes I can see all my pics, and I can relatively easily retrieve them one by one. I have successfully logged in.
My computing skills are not up to emulating an Operating System thanks.
Yeah, I tried, but I couldn’t get mine either. I had to just let them go.
I checked again, once I log in, I end up at an address like this:
Photobucket | The safer way to store your photos*; ensure your address is in this format.
I can select several pictures and reading the Photobucket toolbar I see:
Deselect, Add Album | Share, then icons for: Image Editor, Image Detail, Move to Album Download | Delete, Etc.
Can you even select several pictures at once? It is a single click on each to select or another to deselect that Picture.
I have no account at Photobucket, but played around a bit with somebody’s folder that Google coughed up for me. The “Save webpage, complete” trick doesn’t work — you just get thumbnails. (I did learn that ‘dolphin.jpg’ gives you, not an image, but html/javascript to display a thumbnail. ‘dolphin.jpg~original’ seems to provide the full image.)
How tedious is it to download a single image? (How many mouse clicks are needed?) Preparing a script to download all the images automatically would also be tedious, especially if you have little practice at it.
There used to be a script for it. Checking around on the web, it looks like there may be some browser extensions or other scripts/website that may or may not work.
I just tried to log into my account, that I haven’t logged into since this all happened a while back and it’s says “You have exceeded the 250 image free tier limit. Your options are to either upgrade to a paid plan or remove images to continue using your free account.”
That’s all I get. A blank screen with that message and two buttons, one that says “Upgrade Account” and one that says “Remove Images”. Not even an option to just get access to my account so I can get all my pictures back.
Granted, I downloaded the vast majority of them a while back. But it’s like they’re trying to drive people away. Considering all the free places to store images, if they can’t figure out a way to compete or offer something for that $60/yr, above and beyond storage, I don’t know why they don’t just close up.
Okay, with that screen I just mentioned still up, I hit the back button and it took me to my album. There’s no way to download the entire album. Their own help page for doing this, updated just a few days ago, shows how to do it, but the ‘download album’ button doesn’t exist.
Checking their facebook page, it’s not just me, they’ve clearly disabled the button.
As for how many clicks it takes to download an individual picture, not many.
Once you’re in an album, it’s one click to get to the page with the picture and one click on the ‘download’ button. After that, a typical Windows box pops up asking if you want to open or save the picture.
However, that doesn’t count all the pop ups I got, from PB asking me to confirm my email address. Every single new page I go to, has a box that pops up asking me to confirm my email, I hit confirm. After a few seconds it disappears and a new box pops up thanking me for confirming it and telling me to watch for an email from them. After a few seconds that box fades away.
I haven’t received any emails from them and I suspect, based on the fact that even after clicking confirm or okay the boxes sit there for several seconds with no way to dismiss them is deliberately designed to slow down people trying to download pictures one at a time.
I can’t believe people are paying them a monthly fee. After the stunt they pulled a few years back where they broke every single hotlinked image across the entire internet, everyone should have left and never looked back.
Damn… I tried this and got a message about migrating. Now I cannot access any files at all. The folders are still there but they appear to be empty.
It looks like the Migrate is free, did you do the Migrate? If so, the pic will probably be available soon I guess? I vaguely remember doing the migrate 12-18 months ago.
