peterwgpa
Just a warning to all if you have been using Photobucket to share photos to websites for past 10 years you are in for a rude shock as they have turned it all off and want to charge $400 USD a year for the privilege. Below is someone elses experience as their words sum it up very well.
A few days ago, without any advance warning, Photobucket sneakily changed its terms of service to disallow third-party hosting, or hotlinking, on nearly all of its plan tiers. Most people use Photobucket explicitly for the ability to link from images on Photobucket to other locations such as blogs and forums, so this seems like a baffling move.
Until you realize the scam that's afoot: The only way to get your images to show up again is to pay Photobucket $400, upfront, as an annual subscription to its most expensive plan.
Ah, I see. It's a ransom demand.
I'm livid. I'd been using Photobucket to host my images on my Blogger blogs for ten years. For several of those years, I paid Photobucket an annual subscription for the benefits of unlimited bandwidth and extra storage.
A couple years ago or so, though, Photobucket's user interface went downhill.
Fortunately, then, for my more recent posts, I had gotten fed up with Photobucket and started hosting my newer images directly on the Google/Blogger interface. […]
Then, last week, I opened up my blog and saw: Ack! Everything was black-boxed. My header, my sidebar icons, my profile picture. It was awful. I tore into my templates and quickly uploaded any image I could find to Blogger, then repasted all the links until my templates were fixed. But, I realized I was still staring into the abyss of hundreds of blogposts, thousands of images, that all needed to be reuploaded and recoded. It was enough to make me want to cry.
My blog of doom
Well, at least I could get my images off Photobucket, right? Nope. You heard me. I can't get my own photos off Photobucket. A decade's worth of blog photos are being held hostage.
jlfents
I've been browsing turbobricks for the past few days. At least 2/3 of the pictures are down. Such a crappy.
Major Ledfoot
$400 a year? That is extortion.
Yet another reason I'm glad I never used them, their horrible spammy javascripts and annoying PITA popups were enough to put me right off of them.
familyman
This is why I avoid 'the cloud' like the plague from the first day I heard of it.. You never know when someone gets greedy, sells their site, gets attacked... dies!
familyman
Don't know what they're talking about... I can access the few pictures I had on there for forums, just fine.
peterwgpa
My pictures still on the photobucket site and can see them when I log in but they have turned off links to any forums where I shared any pics.
Still have pics at home so at least I have them for own use.
familyman
Oh, ok - I must've read it too quickly. Thought the quoted guy said he had to pay to even access his pictures.
jamesinc
Oz Volvo is different, you just drag and drop
peterwgpa
Well I have downloaded all pics from photobucket via a zip file and created an IMGUR account and uploaded some pics to test and now have some understanding on how their site works.
Philia_Bear
Currently downloading all my photos and video before shutting down the account(s)
peterwgpa
Couldn't find how to pull the videos down
jamesinc
I need to finish my backup script actually. I was writing a tool to scrape the database for imgur links and download a copy to Oz Volvo's backup archive.
sucksqueezebangblow
I only just recently realised how good this forum is for uploading photos, with it just using Imgur.
Before this I was using photobucket but noticed it was getting slower and slower and more ads.
jamesinc
Imgur is a little more ad-dy than it used to be, but they haven't touched their API. Still, I'm working on the assumption they might eventually do that, so hopefully if it happens we can port all the images across to another provider (or self-host)