I've used photobucket to share pictures on a.net for 10-15 years. Now they have blocked all worldwide users who shared pictures on other sites

They ask $399. We are talking about millions of users here. It's one of the biggest photo services. They didn't warn anyone for 15 years
and seem now also to be blocking downloading / securing your photo's pictures.

http://support.photobucket.com/hc/en-us/articles/201892970-Downloading-Albums

Personally I have everything backed up. But millions of users not (all pictures. They trusted the service after so many years.

This is going to be interesting. Photobucket basically declared war on their millions of users, taking them essentially hostage.

It seems they also disabled tools to download / recover your own pictures back from photobucket..



I guess no one will ever open a new photobucket account again. But that's not a problem, they have millions existing, now panicking users, man women, young, old and hope a percentage will pay.

I wonder if there's a authority that will step in. This seems to break a series of rules.



John Corpus, President and Chief Executive Officer at Photobucket, HQ Denver, CO

The blocking started several days ago.
I have noticed complaints from users at other sites as well.

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$399 does seem pretty high.


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It is really going to be an issue where one can not go back and edit old postings where a photo/image was linked.


Okie

Bad press, no revenue from it, and everybody moving to imgur. Brilliant move from your typical C-suite douchebag.

use facebook for image hosting. 100% uptime, no limits, worldwide CDN, no bankruptcy promise.
They even keep your photos after you think you deleted them.

My photos are not blocked and everything seems to be working OK.

This is horrible for a lot of older trip reports, most of which have an author who isn't active here anymore.

scbriml wrote:

My photos are not blocked and everything seems to be working OK.

Photobucket appear to be moving in the direction of no longer offering certain types of account. Your current status should continue until the end of the current subscription period, at which point I guess you have the option of upgrading or no longer using the linking and/or 3rd party hosting service.

Future plans include:

Plus 50 offers 52GB of Storage and No Linking or 3rd Party Hosting

Plus 100 offers 102GB of Storage, Unlimited Linking and No 3rd Party Hosting

Plus 500 offers 502GB of Storage, Unlimited Linking and Unlimited 3rd Party Hosting

You used to be able to change the automatic recurring payments setting from within the settings page. This now appears to have been amended to require you to send an email requesting the change.

The web site is undergoing various changes and, when I last tried, pages were slow to load and were not displaying correctly.

It's a business decision. They'll either profit from it or not.

Maybe not well thought out or communicated, but it is their prerogative to do so. I imagine, somewhere along the line they provided their customers a "Terms of Service" agreement, that no one read, that explained they can change their business practices whenever they want.

Okie wrote:

I wonder if there's a authority that will step in. This seems to break a series of rules.

Which "rules" or laws/regulations, exactly?

keesje wrote:

John Corpus, President and Chief Executive Officer at Photobucket, HQ Denver, CO

Why post his picture? So that we can throw our triple, non-fat, non-diary, soy, mocha latte at him if we see him in the street?

They changed without prior warning. Photobucket promoted sharing by actively offering direct and html links, copied automatically. Downloading your content to secure has been changed, the old menu has gone, I haven't found it yet.

I think it's smart business, specially regarding family photo's put on during the last 16 years by less IT focussed, aging people. John Corpus has an excellent feeling for captive customer business. Not telling them, promoting sharing of images and then when your servers are filled, kabang, USD400 take it our leave it. Congratulations! He should be heading Microsoft.

I'm not impacted, but the panick reactions on forums show Corpus has them by the b.lls! Business is Busines.

fr8mech wrote:

Which "rules" or laws/regulations, exactly?

The US legal system doesn't know the concept of business being done in good faith?

Best regards
Thomas

tommy1808 wrote:

The US legal system doesn't know the concept of business being done in good faith?

I wonder about this too. The law has some measures in place to punish and rectify such nasty surprises.

Just recently, a man quit his well-paid job to avoid having to pay alimony to his ex-wife. Our Swiss supreme court decided he was not allowed to quit his job. Doing so is legal in itself, but one cannot exercise a right when the (main) intention is hurting another person.

Myself, I entrust my better pictures to Wikimedia Commons. Everybody is allowed to copy and store them - that way, my pictures will never be erased from our Earth.


David

I just realized today about the hotlinking ( i think they called it that), I only had about 450pics. As far as not being allowed to delete them I Just went on the site today which was dead slow, downloaded all my pics deleted them from my bucket and deleted/closed my account. It will close in 48 hours, I went back in a bit ago and no pics are in there. Most of my stuff was linked to sites non existent anymore anyway. Lots of other options I would think.

C.

Mine seems to be working just fine, am I missing something?

And while im at it, isnt she a beauty!

fr8mech wrote:

Why post his picture? So that we can throw our triple, non-fat, non-diary, soy, mocha latte at him if we see him in the street?

What is the inference in that?

I'm not bothered by this, as I wasn't one of those people who used Photobucket. I paid for hosting from another service and have done for a long time. I don't have to deal with adverts and all the other stuff.

Self-hosted content isn't subject to this problem (millions of voices crying out all at once and then silenced) but it's also more of a pain for whoever is posting the photos.

I get sad when I think of all the ancient history on the net which just became more difficult or impossible to understand. The Internet Archive Project and archiveteam are doing a good thing.

Central points of failure hurt when they fail.

Mine went as per OP but now after a few days its back and I have not upgraded . Maybe the reaction has changed their minds? If they do it again then I will just ditch them like many others.

I am locked out, but have all backed up so F*** em, plently of other free sites out there

If you have enough bandwidth, host your own. Any photo uploaded to a free site is their property, you have no say.

As someone who has posted trip reports since about 2004 I've used Photobucket, Imageshack, Imagestation, Facebook, Tinypic, Imgur....at some point everyone changes their promise and it's no longer free and unlimited. At the moment I'm using Imgur.

What is annoying is that on other sites you can go back and adjust the hyperlinks so that images work. I've asked several times over the years that authors of trip reports be allowed to edit their initial posts so that authors can go back and update images to working hosting sites. Nothing has ever come of it, so my 70 or so trip reports are mostly just prose with broken, crappy looking links. Oh well.

anshabhi wrote:

use facebook for image hosting. 100% uptime, no limits, worldwide CDN, no bankruptcy promise.
They even keep your photos after you think you deleted them.

I did this for a while but then Facebook changed the way their links work so the ones I'd hosted for trip reports no longer worked.

Expecting Internet URLs to "work forever" is pretty naive.

scbriml wrote:

Expecting Internet URLs to "work forever" is pretty naive.

That really contributes to the thread

DDR wrote:

scbriml wrote:

Expecting Internet URLs to "work forever" is pretty naive.

That really contributes to the thread

My post was a direct response to fgbdavidson's post.

While your post contributes what?

tommy1808 wrote:

fr8mech wrote:

Which "rules" or laws/regulations, exactly?

The US legal system doesn't know the concept of business being done in good faith?

No. completely foreign concept.
The state can even disown people to the advantage of other "persons"
to shift their property to a more promising "partner".

dtw2hyd wrote:

If you have enough bandwidth, host your own. Any photo uploaded to a free site is their property, you have no say.

So? That doesn't mean they are free from criticisms, provided they are rationally, and politely made, and is not really "anything goes" - even free services have to act in a manner that won't piss people off, otherwise they will face issues in retaining users (not to mention their actions affect their reputation). Not to mention *I would IMAGINE, at least** that there could be laws regarding the data, retention, rights, notice given for terms updates (which could very by country, by state, etc), that also have to be taken into account, irrespective of how much (or not) it costs to use a service.

I personally use a spare Google Blogger/Blogspot account for my image hosting needs, have yet to experience any issues. *knocks on wood*

travelsonic wrote:

...I personally use a spare Google Blogger/Blogspot account for my image hosting needs, have yet to experience any issues. *knocks on wood*

Most may never have any issue with accessing their own picture, doesn't mean the terms & conditions you accepted before using free service cannot be enforced. Legally site storing your data for free has upper hand.

scbriml wrote:

DDR wrote:

scbriml wrote:

Expecting Internet URLs to "work forever" is pretty naive.

That really contributes to the thread

My post was a direct response to fgbdavidson's post.

While your post contributes what?

My post wasn't condescending, like most of yours.

DDR wrote:

My post wasn't condescending, like most of yours.

My post wasn't condescending in the slightest, just a statement of fact.

Storing your stuff on the Internet and expecting the URLs to work "for ever" is naive.

scbriml wrote:

Storing your stuff on the Internet and expecting the URLs to work "for ever" is naive.

unless you have your own Domain. Which isn´t expensive anymore....

best regards
Thomas

I think the biggest issues people have are that 1) it happened without ANY notice whatsoever, and 2) the pricing is so high. How in the name of hell do they expect to survive with such high fees, and a lack of a more limited free option, when competing services have much, much lower fees (maybe up to 20x lower?), and a more limited free option for users who want it/are content with the limitations?

Keesje, an example, your nice thread

Airbus MoM / NMA / A310 replacement, 2025? (https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1361105)

is also affected. You had some nice drawings of a hypothetical/paper A370 there, you still find them via Google image search but no longer here in the forum. Because of the Google images I also know that I remember them correctly.

Maybe this thread should be moved to site-related or re-opened there, it's a major issue for the entire forum IMO.

A350

I think you can try to restore photos on your pc using data recovery software. I prefer to use Disk Drill app, you can read more about it here https://www.cleverfiles.com/mac-formatted-drive-recovery.html. Its basic app has free options. Hope it will help you to get back all your photos.

It was a wrong business decision and Photobucket acknowledged.

The CEO who came up withe plan has been replaced & linked content restored.

Also on a.net. Thank you photobucket. I hope the company will survive this.

“We have taken back Photobucket and are working diligently to return it to the premier image storing and hosting service that it was known as previously,” said Ted Leonard, CEO, Photobucket. “There were some mistakes made and we acknowledge them. Our new leadership is dedicated to helping our customers do great things with their images in a fair, cost-effective and valuable way.”

As of today, all hosted images that Photobucket’s customers had lost access to last year have been restored.

keesje wrote:

Also on a.net. Thank you photobucket. I hope the company will survive this..[/size]

Yup. They also probably just realized that when they where doing would mean massive penalties and/or prison under the new European data protection law.

Best regards
Thomas