Photobucket Picture Policy change

[Salty19]

Sailors, we have some bad news on the picture posting here on the forum and for all internet forums.

A few days ago, Photobucket, a popular free image hosting site, has changed their policy to disallow free 3rd party picture linking.   This gives the ability for a user to link to their pictures posted on photobucket like many do here often.

Instead, they are now charging a $400 annual fee for members to be able to link to their pictures on internet forums such as this one, and all other forums as well.    Many of us use Photobucket to share pictures on CPYOA and are therefore impacted by this.  You'll soon notice that many pictures here are "gone" so to speak--they were linked to Photobucket and they are disallowing the user from linking to it any longer.  The pictures that you do see are not associated with photobucket--either linked elsewhere or uploading right to our site.

I am appalled at this policy change as they have effectively impacted billions of picture links on the web, and are now holding the users hostage with an exorbitant fee to allow the 3rd party picture view feature.  Whether they change the policy again is unknown, but I am sure they are getting a lot of pressure to do so.

With this said, consider your photobucket picture links "dead" for good.  Ya'll may want to login to photobucket, download all of your albums and prepare to place them on another site so that others can view them.  I am doing so and am considering photobucket "dead to me".

I am looking into another free photo hosting provider to use.  Suggestions are welcome, I know there are many...which one is best?

[Gerry]

Those dirty buggers.

[crazycarl]

There has been a lot of talk about this on the air gun forum I frequent.

[brackish]

I had been thinking of finding an alternative to photobucket anyway.  I have a free account and initially it was good.  But over time it became much more cumbersome to use.  They kept loading it up with ad content so that the constant popups made it almost impossible to use.  I had been considering going to a paid account to get rid of the ads.  Now I guess I'll just go somewhere else.

My links are currently not broken???

I've seen a lot of chat about alternatives, some folks mention using the ISP storage space that most providers offer.  Additionally I've seen comments about the cloud used for storage but not sure about the linking potential.  icloud and google drive come to mind.

someone much more tech savvy than me will have to figure this out. 

[JTMeissner]

I tried PM's an admin when the change occurred (noticed my avatar pic was gone). 

The impact is far and wide, Amazon and eBay images broken by Photobucket's 'ransom demand' is a BBC article on the topic.

I have back-ups of all the photos I've uploaded (I think) on my home computer.  It will be quite troublesome to try and go back and "fix" all the links in old posts over years regardless of where the pictures are loaded.

Some options: 12 Free Image Hosting Sites for Your Photos

-Justin

[crazycarl]

be aware of ALL storage sites.  read the agreements.  some claim title to all information to be used as they see fit upon the user's death. 

then there is the possibility of the "cloud" hosting company being bought out and your information held by the new company for a fee.

i personally do not use "dropbox" or any "cloud" hosting sites.  all my info is kept on my laptop and the 1st of each month i back it up to an external drive and place it in our safety deposit box until the next month.  this is some insurance that if my laptop is damaged, stolen or lost in a fire or tornado, all my information and pictures are safe.

i only have a photo bucket account to post pics here, and now that is no longer necessary.

c.c.

[BruceW]

What about Dropbox, or iCloud type services?

[tmw]

Companies have to make money at some point, or face extinction.  I'd wager Photobucket wasn't making enough money, hence the policy change where users have to come to their site, where they can be exposed ads and company can make money.  Kind of surprised they don't represent the images with links to the site that will show the picture with ads to help drive their revenue.

I personally love google photos, because I take the picture once, and it shows up on all my devices, and sharing is pretty simple/easy.

Embedding the image on this site is a little convoluted, as it's a 3 step process, but works well, like this trip from the ramp down to the pier.


That, and Google already has a solid financial setting, based on getting users into the full Google ecosystem (e.g. photos is one component that gets the user to use the other features where they do have ads and make money), so I'm pretty confident they are not likely to pull this type of shenanigan.

Just my thoughts, I won't be offended when others disagree.

[relamb]

I know I've linked to photobucket pictures for my posts.   I don't mind moving them elsewhere, assuming I could identify the posts where I've linked pics.
Could the site admin run a report of the broken photobucket links, maybe per user?
I would be willing to go back and edit the posts to point elsewhere.
It would be a shame to lose everybody's pics!

[K3v1n]

I have a lot of pictures on Photobucket, guess all those links will be dead. I started using Imgur recently because Photobucket is sooooooooo slooooooooow. Can't see why anyone would pay a dime for their service.

[tmw]

I would second imgur as another solid, geek approved, well established image hosting service.

[Short Sale]

My photo links are not broken yet, but I imagine it is only a matter of time.  It also could be that I was not "linking" them correctly.  Photobucket's pop up ads will NOT be missed.  Regardless, I will be using the new method of using my computer to reduce the size of the photo before "attaching" the photo file to my posts. 

Thanks to all you guys who maintain this incredibly useful forum. 

[Tim Gardner]

I will be working on migrating the CPYOA photobucket account to another location.  Restoring the links will be time consuming.  I'll be posting instructions on how to restore Your links soon.

TG

[Salty19]

Just a note that IMGUR's Terms of Service appears to disallow 3rd party hosting.  Take a look...http://imgur.com/tos


"Also, don't use Imgur to host image libraries you link to from elsewhere, content for your website, advertising, avatars, or anything else that turns us into your content delivery network. If you do – and we will be the judge – or if you do anything illegal, in addition to any other legal rights we may have, we will ban you along with the site you're hotlinking from, delete all your images, report you to the authorities if necessary, and prevent you from viewing any images hosted on Imgur.com. We mean it."

I'm leaning towards Google Images as a new 3rd party host.

Thanks for posting the instructions to relink pics, Tim.   Everyone should be encouraged to at least update some of your pics, and over time get to as many as you can.