PhotoBucket to end free 3rd party image hosting

We all need to make a buck, but such a big change after 14 years? I agree with the comments shown in that article. It is a ransom - pay us $400 or all your websites and blogs fail. It is also commercial suicide - few individuals will pay $400 when there are other free options. If it is an old website or blog then they probably won't care if the pictures are broken - how many people will be looking at it anyway.* If it is new, then they will use something free. An organisation or someone looking after many websites commercially, well then they may consider it is worth the ransom to avoid the extra work, but they won't be very happy customers.

*Should old Blogs even be updated? I saw a Tweet the other day concerning someone who had complained that statistics were 4 years out of date in a Blog from 2014. You wouldn't revise newspaper articles, and would rarely revise books.
 
And Photobucket are making it all worse by providing poor support and handling the criticisms really poorly. What I hadn't considered is that after 14 years many people have lost any other copies of their original images. Photobucket gave no notice that they were going to do this (at least I have images there and I first heard about it here) and so people had no time to prepare for it. Photobucket have changed the way you access photos now, it is more complicated, and people have forgotten their passwords. People are annoyed and are trying to get help and the helpdesk is unprepared and overloaded. They are condescending to complaints and taking a very long time to respond. It is a case study in very bad customer relations.

The other thing I hadn't considered is all those very old websites that are hosted free but are still well used and still very useful to many people. The creators or owners may have gone away, aren't interested more, or even may have died. That doesn't mean that the websites aren't important, just not maintained. Now they are all broken, and to everyone that can no longer use them, Photobucket is advertising exactly who is responsible for that.

I'm surprised that there hasn't been more reported about this. I haven't seen anything from TV or Newspapers. Surprising, given that the people affected are likely to be older people, even "silver surfers" who still get their news mainly from TV and newspapers.
 
It certainly puts into question the mentality of Photobucket, to do what they did almost totally of the blue and without any prior warning (at least not as far as I can tell). Any decent host provider will give maybe 6-12 months prior warning; but here it seems they've taken the "shut up shop and pay up now!" attitude - basically legal ransomware!

It will also be interesting to know what happens to all those photos currently uploaded to their storage arrays by users who won't pay up the $400pa now? Who owns the property rights? And will Photobucket sell them on for profit?

This may also give other "free" image hosts similar ideas relating to introducing a fee for the service - although perhaps not quite in the same "sledgehammer to crack a nut" manner!

Either way, for people who do upload images to the "cloud" via these hosting sites, it might be wise to scale back just in case it happens again.
 
Don't forget that they are still storing the images for free. As I understand it it's only the hot linking that people will have to pay for. So if they choose not to pay they can still access their images but, to make the website that access those images work again, they will have to move them somewhere else and then change the hot links.
 
That's true, but I've already outlined the additional problems people are having with that. It is really a problem with a lack of notice, and a lack of customer support, and an attitude from them that, it is your problem not ours. Of course, I'm assuming here that they actually want to keep customers, when maybe this is really just a way to get rid of all hosted images.
 
Oh I agree completely. I suspect the problem for photobucket is they are now probably paying more for the bandwidth of hotlinked images than they are for the storage of those images. They probably didn't anticipate that they would be quite so heavily used in this way. However that in no way excuses the appalling way they have handled the change or the outrageous fee; I can have an entire website (with hundreds of MB of storage) hosted with serious bandwidth usage for $400 a year and have had (bear in mind my business is selling photographic prints online so we have a lot of images stored online).
 
The way I see it its actually a very smart move. They've seen how people kicked up enough of a storm to get Microsoft to support WinXp well beyond where MS wanted to. Photobucket knows that they are a major internet website, big enough that if they pulled the plug people would lash out - and since the website is owned by a company with fingers in other pots that might well mean that the owning company gets hit hard with demands to extend their service.

So they make their service so unattractive, expensive and impractical to use that everyone just leaves in droves. The result is that they don't get the money, but they do lose customers by the legion; especially any "serious" customers. This paves the way for them to either kill off or downplay it until its running costs are lower than its income - even if no one ever actually purchases the accounts they are offering.


This is coupled with the site being generally poor grade these days; their pages are chocked with ads to the point where they lag heavily on even a good connection when trying to upload.
 
I have already seen the ugly consequences of this on various forums I visit (see image below). Really horrid and looks bad for all concerned. There are many free sites still available as an option, but from what I have been reading in the 'pooter press is that some of these may go the same way and start charging.

I suppose realistically setting a reasonable fee for this service is acceptable to a point - but for someone like Photobucket to unilaterally decide to hit people with a $400 subscription or lose their images, is harsh to the extreme.

photobucket.PNG
 
Asking for a fee is not unreasonable but I've never believed in giving in to blackmail and demanding $400 off the bat is exactly that. No more Photobucket for me.
 
Overread said:
So they make their service so unattractive, expensive and impractical to use that everyone just leaves in droves. The result is that they don't get the money, but they do lose customers by the legion; especially any "serious" customers. This paves the way for them to either kill off or downplay it until its running costs are lower than its income.
Click to expand...
This is the only possible explanation from a business sense of view. A company with a vision for the future would use the goodwill of the customer base they already have and sell them add-ons and new services. What they are doing is alienating anyone who has ever used them before. Most of whom will just say:
Foxbat said:
No more Photobucket for me.
Click to expand...

My concern is more about all those, often very good, old websites, no longer maintained, but well used and loved, on a wide variety of unusual but interesting subjects, and now all broken.
 
Yes they've broken a huge chunk of old websites and blogs. The only hope is that by breaking them the owners might restore and revitalise them. This was bound to happen; the early days of the net it was dead easy to run cheap or free websites and al ot got setup. Now-a-days the vast volume of traffic is starting to push toward hosts needing some income and thus older sites are coming under new management when their hosts are big. I think that the advertising bubble has also started to burst so there isn't "as" much profit there as there used to be.
 
I use Photobucket because one of the mods recommenced it soon after I joined the Chrons. Now that I can't post book covers from Photobucket anymore, can someone recommend another site similar to Photobucket so I can continue to post my book hauls and current reads?
 
There must be many others. I have also used Flickr, a Yahoo company in the past. However, if they all begin to charge for hotlinking, then long-term you might want to buy your own domain and keep them there. It wouldn't cost very much in comparison. You can store photos in the Gallery here if it is only for using on Chronicles.

What I do now for storage, and what I expect most people use for sharing files and photos between groups, is to use Cloud storage Dropbox or Google Drive - Cloud Storage & File Backup for Photos, Docs & More or iCloud.com Those all come along with a certain amount of free space before you need to pay, but the advantage for groups is that everyone has access. I don't Blog, I tend not to use forums anymore (apart from Chrons), and I haven't created a webpage in 10 years, so hotlinking isn't an issue for me.

Social Media like Facebook lets you store photos for free, so that is another option if you linked to a post or Tweet with the image in it. I tend to manipulate images and make collages so I have photos stored at Amazingly Simple Graphic Design Software – Canva They must have a limit to how much can be stored there, but I haven't hit it yet in over 2 years. They make their money from charging for use of their stock photos.
 
Wow, lots of good info. Thank you. Not on Facebook but may join if I can use it as a substitute for Photobucket. Don't know anything about the Cloud but might snoop around some of the places you suggest and see what I come up with.
 
ATasteForHoney.jpeg

Well, well, well! I just tried to upload a scanned image from my PC and it appears to have worked. Clicking the "Reply to Thread" button will verify this.

It WORKS!!! Can't believe it. Never worked before. Okay, seems problem solved, at least for now. Just got to keep my files down to about 55-60 dpi, I guess.

Excuse me, gotta go buy some books!
 
dask said:
Wow, lots of good info. Thank you. Not on Facebook but may join if I can use it as a substitute for Photobucket. Don't know anything about the Cloud but might snoop around some of the places you suggest and see what I come up with.
Click to expand...
You wouldn't be able to hotlink from those, at least not those that I mentioned, but if it is just for use on Chronicles then click on the Media button on the red line at the top and follow instructions.
 
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