Photobucket nonsense

I just received an email from PB stating that I must upgrade my account with them (Read pay us money) because I am posting photos from my account on Canadian Rodder. They didn't specifically say the CR site, but that's the only one I post on from the PB account.

Have any of you guys received a similar email today - or very recently?

I haven't yet checked to see if they have disabled the photos I have posted thus far.

cocobolo said:

I just received an email from PB stating that I must upgrade my account with them (Read pay us money) because I am posting photos from my account on Canadian Rodder. They didn't specifically say the CR site, but that's the only one I post on from the PB account.

Have any of you guys received a similar email today - or very recently?

I haven't yet checked to see if they have disabled the photos I have posted thus far.

Click to expand...

Been posting from there for years.. nothing as of yet about an upgrade and even if it did I guess they just lost a user.

Update I got "the email" so no longer user of PB,, they were a pain for the last two years anyway with all the ads jamming up my computer... I understand the cost vs return aspect but I am NOT paying for a bunch of ads or paying to have the hosting site plus paying to block the ads! So PB done..

Well, I just checked my former photos, and sure as hell, the bastards have screwed them all up. I suppose that's their way of blackmailing people into paying money. Not sure what I will do yet.

I suppose that will greatly affect the photographic content of this website.

I've had those notices for over a year and they have used the blackmail messages lots. I have done nothing about it. One day through a fluke, I got in and copied a few pics into my laptop and all looked fine. However, when I went to use them elsewhere, the images seemed to compress into a single line and were therefore useless.....

I'm getting the same ransom notice from PB as well and now see that none of my pictures are viewable on this site and others I post on. I also noticed several other members with build threads have also had their pictures removed or blocked from here.
What a shame, lots of content lost. I won't be paying them anything. Time to start over with a new hosting site for pictures I guess.

I have never rec'd any e-mails from Photobucket in regards to this.

I'm almost at maximum and keep deleting the very old photos to gain more space.

But yes, all the photo hosting sites are reducing their "free" storage limits and want you to buy more.

The one thing I do is keep an album on the computer of my build pics but for show & shine pics, I don't.

I delete those off the computer after I have uploaded them to PB.

No emails from photobucket for me either. Now I am not using them anymore as Imgur is Substancially FASTER and no hassles.

Hmmm...well thanks guys for your responses.

I'm nowhere near the maximum allowed at PB. Although I have been getting messages constantly about "updating" my membership with them. I have ignored all those messages.

If I had to pay money to post photos on CR, then I would much rather pay it directly to Frank. At least I would know it wasn't getting gobbled up by some greedy corporate entity.

I think that we should try to figure out a realistic way to be able to keep posting photos here, otherwise it will be the death of the site. I would hate to see that after all the time and effort that Frank and Judy have put into it.

I do realize that there are number of photo hosting sites out there, but if PB is pulling this stunt, how long before they all do the same thing?

It's just like the once mighty Sears that didn't change its' business model and is now getting buried.

cocobolo said:

Hmmm...well thanks guys for your responses.

I'm nowhere near the maximum allowed at PB. Although I have been getting messages constantly about "updating" my membership with them. I have ignored all those messages.

If I had to pay money to post photos on CR, then I would much rather pay it directly to Frank. At least I would know it wasn't getting gobbled up by some greedy corporate entity.

I think that we should try to figure out a realistic way to be able to keep posting photos here, otherwise it will be the death of the site. I would hate to see that after all the time and effort that Frank and Judy have put into it.

I do realize that there are number of photo hosting sites out there, but if PB is pulling this stunt, how long before they all do the same thing?

It's just like the once mighty Sears that didn't change its' business model and is now getting buried.

Click to expand...

You do realize that you upload/post your photos first on PB and then download/post to CR, not the other way around.

Frank does it that way to minimize his server space and subsequent cost.

There are some forums (i.e. Hub garage, etc.) that allow you to post photos on their site directly from your computer , however, massive amounts of server space is required to store them.
And that costs the host money. Hence the advertising, pop-ups and the ilk that goes with cost recovery.

Photobucket use to have 5GB of free space but have since kept reducing this to where it is now at 2GB.

I also see that they have dropped the 20GB plan and the lowest is now 50GB.

It's all about cost recovery, even The H.A.M.B. charges if you want "ad free" access.

Got the ransom email from the bucket.

Started downloading my photos and will start using imgr.

The Bucket will end up like a few other sites that tried to force people to pay to use. IE:: angelfire/geocities/tripod all gone via the way of the dodo.

1Kool52 said:

You do realize that you upload/post your photos first on PB and then download/post to CR, not the other way around.

Frank does it that way to minimize his server space and subsequent cost.

There are some forums (i.e. Hub garage, etc.) that allow you to post photos on their site directly from your computer , however, massive amounts of server space is required to store them.
And that costs the host money. Hence the advertising, pop-ups and the ilk that goes with cost recovery.

Photobucket use to have 5GB of free space but have since kept reducing this to where it is now at 2GB.

I also see that they have dropped the 20GB plan and the lowest is now 50GB.

It's all about cost recovery, even The H.A.M.B. charges if you want "ad free" access.

Click to expand...

I'm all too aware of the costs to run a website, having done so myself in the past. And yes, I understand that the pics are put on PB - or whatever hosting site you may choose - and then re-posted here.

Quite frankly, I don't mind the ads, and on occasion I will end up buying from the advertiser. Just about every site these days allows advertising so that the average Joe can use the site in question for free.

I am also certain that as these sites grow in size, that the owners can make a handsome profit from the advertising. And that I have no issue with whatsoever.

In one instance, I won a short contest on a DIY site which paid me $350 U.S. for doing nothing but running a thread, so obviously there is money to be made...but only, I think, if you have a very large ACTIVE subscriber base. And therein lies the rub. You could have 20,000 subscribers, but only a small handful of active users.

So getting back to PB, I fail to see any point in having any photos hosted there if we are unable to post them on another site. I was always under the impression that this was one of the main reasons for these various hosting sites. Apparently I was very wrong in that assumption.

I do have accounts with a couple of other hosting sites, but with my old timers' settling in I can't remember any of the passwords that go with them. Maybe with a little digging I can locate one of them. In the meantime, I will see if I can find a way to delete everything off PB.

Incidentally, the DIY site has a 100KB file size limit per photo, which I'm sure helps immensely to keep their volume within reason. Although I will guess that they have tens of thousands of photos up on the site at any given time.

I find that 100 KB is more than enough to show a decent sized picture.

For what it's worth - I just checked to see what PB wants to charge for their "upgrade", of which they have three versions.

At 50 gigs, you aren't even allowed to link to another site, which means that it's useless for us.

At 100 gigs, you can link, but that's about it. For that they want either $99 a year, or $9.99 a month, U.S. dinero or course.

There is a much higher version, 500 gigs, basically no limits but I have no interest in that sort of volume. Besides I keep all mine pics on my ancient desktop...for that it still works OK.

For that price there are much better options available. A basic plan from SmugMug works out to $3.99 US per month if you go with the annual billing, and that gets you unlimited uploads and no restrictions on image sharing or linking.

Flickr also offers 1 TB of space across the board (including their free plans) and their top plan maxes out at $49.99 US annually, so $399.99 US a year for half the storage as a free plan from a direct competitor just seems silly.

cocobolo said:

In the meantime, I will see if I can find a way to delete everything off PB.

Click to expand...

I didn't have that much stuff on there, but I just downloaded all my content (one photo at a time because their "download album" function didn't work), deleted all the images in each folder, then deleted the folders. So clunky.

I also received the email and all my photobucket links are broken.
It looks like they are getting a lot of negative press as a result.

https://thenextweb.com/apps/2017/07...in-how-not-to-treat-your-users/#.tnw_FbqhcbNv

https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/4/15919224/photobucket-broken-images-amazon-ebay-etsy-paid-update

Time to try something different I think.

Looks like there's a huge number of people who aren't happy about PB.

Then PB claims that their paid options are "competitive" with other sites. Doesn't really look like that to me.

I see one of two things happening. Either PB changes this new business model, or they will go out of business in the near future.

My attempts to try and delete photos so far have drawn a blank. I suppose it might just be tens of thousands of other people trying to do the same and their site is overloaded. Don't know for sure.

To clarify I didn't receive an email from them (perhaps because the address in my profile was out of date), and I didn't see the warning message on any of my images.

I have noticed that some of the image sizes are different since downloading them from PB and re-uploading to Flickr, but thankfully all of my photos from when I first obtained my truck are backed up on disc and since they were taken on film I still have all the negatives.

I was chatting to an acquaintance yesterday about this latest PB stunt, and he had a very different outlook on this whole thing. It goes like this.

So the owner of the CR site doesn't want to provide bandwidth enabling the direct posting of photos. Yet he expects another site to provide this service for free thus enabling his site to be able to show photos. Is that right?

So I said, yes, I guess that's about right.

He just said, "Think about that for awhile."

Don't shoot me, I'm only the messenger.

cocobolo said:

I was chatting to an acquaintance yesterday about this latest PB stunt, and he had a very different outlook on this whole thing. It goes like this.

So the owner of the CR site doesn't want to provide bandwidth enabling the direct posting of photos. Yet he expects another site to provide this service for free thus enabling his site to be able to show photos. Is that right?

So I said, yes, I guess that's about right.

He just said, "Think about that for awhile."

Don't shoot me, I'm only the messenger.

Click to expand...

I am not sure I agree with his take. Frank provides a site for like minded people to communicate about a common interest. I don't think he "expects" anyone to host pictures for free as he is not asking people to post pictures. We the users are the ones who have grown to expect someone to host our pictures for free either through a service like Photobucket or a site like this to take on the burden of the expense. I don't think any of us would expect someone to store our things for free but until this point it has been an expectation of using the internet. That is clearly changing as the volume continue to increase and advertising is not covering the costs or not being worth the value to advertisers with things like ad blockers being used. It was a crappy way Photobucket went about it but it seemed like it was inevitable.