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photobucket p500 issue/no more free sharing [merged]

Not only that, but there are a lot of people out there that are now contemplating having to go back over dozens of posts and tutorials that still get a fair amount of traffic and redoing all of those links.

I think that in a lot of areas, but especially when it comes to technology, that we are giving too much control over to other people and that is to our detriment.
 
now for the hard question, how do you move thousands of pictures from photobucket to another host site?

Ah, I used a tool Smugmug has to move my photobucket images over a few months ago. I hadn't posted anything new to PB in years and the last time I was on it there were a ton of ads and it was slow.

The tool is a Firefox plugin. Here's the link: https://smugglr.smugmug.com/

So moving the images is the easy part though. Then you need to redo all the links. Which is a pain, but since I didn't have anything new, I just wait until I see an old post and update it.
 
Odd.... My East coast trip report here has all it's image links from PB and to my knowledge I've not been asked to pony up. If I were asked, I'm not sure I'd do it.
 
I haven't used my PB in years, not since I picked up a smug mug account, which I don't use as often as I use to. Hoping to change that soon, thinking about starting a blog to share our adventure of moving to CO.
But this thread got me thinking and I went over to PB to see if anything was still there. Lots of old pics I had forgotten I took, but holy pop-up ads batman. What a pain to navigate now.

Ah, I used a tool Smugmug has to move my photobucket images over a few months ago. I hadn't posted anything new to PB in years and the last time I was on it there were a ton of ads and it was slow.

The tool is a Firefox plugin. Here's the link: https://smugglr.smugmug.com/

So moving the images is the easy part though. Then you need to redo all the links. Which is a pain, but since I didn't have anything new, I just wait until I see an old post and update it.

Great tip here, looks like I'll be trying to get all my pics from my PB account so I won't ever have to go there again. :thumb:
 
I'm using imgur:

free
good phone app for uploading
good image page for linking with html and bb codes

and did I mention, it is free?
 
I haven't used my PB in years, not since I picked up a smug mug account, which I don't use as often as I use to. Hoping to change that soon, thinking about starting a blog to share our adventure of moving to CO.
But this thread got me thinking and I went over to PB to see if anything was still there. Lots of old pics I had forgotten I took, but holy pop-up ads batman. What a pain to navigate now.



Great tip here, looks like I'll be trying to get all my pics from my PB account so I won't ever have to go there again. :thumb:

All of my pictures are still on PB and still available to me, but all my older posts on TWT have the pictures deleted.
 
My 2 cents....
nothing is free in life. PB today, tomorrow...?
I pay $2/mo for Google drive storage, but not happy with a lot of Google photo sharing options.
I've decided if I go to something new, it'll be my own site, own storage. I just don't have the time or energy to tackle it right now. Some pretty cheap hosting services these days, e.g. namecheap.com
 
So I logged into photo bucket yesterday and I have quite a few more pictures there than I thought. Tonight, I get the dreaded "you have been third party hosting links and it's time to upgrade" email. LOL at a crossroads now.
 
This is a perfect example of why I have never trusted the idea of the "Cloud". The simple reality is that your data is on someone else's machine. So unless you keep a back up, your data can be held hostage. Even if you have the data, your use of it, like third party linking, can be disrupted and again you are essentially held hostage. User agreements can be changed. In light of all the revelations about the NSA, et al, and their strong arm behavior with companies and their hacking abilities, the notion that your data is encrypted is small comfort.
 
I keep my photos on my desktop, on a backup drive that is disconnected unless I am backing it up, and also have them backed up to google photos. if google wasn't free then I wouldn't.

I usually use the links from google photos because they are larger and visible (on the forum), because the size of photos you can actually load on the site is pretty small in size (understandeable given its hosted on a private server), and also if you can get a 640 x 480 picture under 200 bytes it usually lacks detail or definition.

I try to upload things so they will be at least 1280 x 1024 but I think also when you link from google photo it does adjust to whatever your browser window is sized at (but I could be wrong). I just try not to link photos where you have to scroll around or download them to view them.
 
Well Photobucket just hit me too. Fortunately I have not been posting too many photos in the last few years, so no real loss. It seems PB have been in a death spiral for some time. First it was slow servers, then constant popup advertising, and finally advertising that no self respecting site would show like off-putting health related stuff. I hear they won't even let users download their existing photos unless they upgrade. No loss, I have always put low resolution images on Photobucket anyway.

I've had consulting clients want to switch to NetSuite and have warned them off because of NetSuite's tendency to hold customer's data hostage. I don't think it is a problem for larger providers like Google or Microsoft who are more interested in capturing users to their services, rather than ransoming their data. Of course Yahoo, who for a long time wouldn't let users setup mail forwarding to competing services, proves that not even big companies are risk free. As for the cloud being particularly risky, I doubt that few are savvy enough to fully protect anything attached to the internet, especially on any new Windows platform, but that is just five years of being an IT director talking. IT security guys knew full well about the Quantico Circuit years before Snowden made it to the popular press. Thankfully it's all just motorcycle talk. They can read it if they want and if they miss a few pictures, again no loss.
 
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My photos are still available to me. About a year ago, they told me that my free storage was full. I deleted over 400 pictures and I'm still at 99.76%. ??????
I switched to FLIKR. Way more storage for free and much faster. There is one extras step to getting a picture to post, but the step is much faster than waiting for PH ads to pop up.
 
I'm not too terribly concerned about it at the moment now that I see what they have.... I think maybe I'll try to fix the East Coast Trip links as that was a pretty good trip, maybe another one. But I'm not going to go update the pie run pics or any of the other stuff out there.... It's just not worth my time. I'll do the migration/fix then just delete them all....


This is what's over there....
i-T7W6SrF.jpg
 
Ah, I used a tool Smugmug has to move my photobucket images over a few months ago. I hadn't posted anything new to PB in years and the last time I was on it there were a ton of ads and it was slow.

The tool is a Firefox plugin. Here's the link: https://smugglr.smugmug.com/

So moving the images is the easy part though. Then you need to redo all the links. Which is a pain, but since I didn't have anything new, I just wait until I see an old post and update it.

Was this pretty straight forward to use? Can you give a quick run-down on how it works? If it brings them over by gallery to SM, I suppose I can have two windows open at the same time to include my SM and TWT and maybe a second instance of TWT to see what image I'm looking to replace.
 
For over 10 years I used 1&1 web hosting and domain registering. At first for a real website, but then it was just a picture/file hosting spot for my personal use.

Over the last couple years, they began jacking the price. Not too bad, but over time, it was crowding $11/month if I paid a year in advance.

In May, something changed. I must've missed a notification or ignored to one of the numerous spam e-mails they would send. My FTP client would no longer work. I tried everything I could think of and attempted using their tech support. It appears their tech support is from a call center farm in India.

So today was the day ... I cancelled. They never tried to keep me, nor fix my issues. Just ... OK, it's cancelled - click.



i-PNW7Q2v-X2.jpg



And another, testing the how the file structure works - folders vs galleries.

2017_ArkTrip_Mar_03_1200-XL.jpg


So here is my test post from smugmug. I don't like the fact that the filename is changed to some alphanumeric code.
How can I match up files on my local drive with those on the hosting site?

Thought this change process might be helpful to others seeking an alternative file host

Another revelation ... only accepts jpg, png and gif files.
No PDFs or TIFs

I sometimes have to send a high res PDF to a print shop in Carrollton.
 
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I try to upload things so they will be at least 1280 x 1024 but I think also when you link from google photo it does adjust to whatever your browser window is sized at (but I could be wrong). I just try not to link photos where you have to scroll around or download them to view them.

Same here ... I resize photos that are web bound to 1200 pixels wide.

Works well on most any, modern monitor and keeps the filesize down to a manageable size.
 
Was this pretty straight forward to use? Can you give a quick run-down on how it works? If it brings them over by gallery to SM, I suppose I can have two windows open at the same time to include my SM and TWT and maybe a second instance of TWT to see what image I'm looking to replace.

Honestly, I've slept a few time since then. I just remember you load the plugin into Firefox, enter some info about Smugmug and then it does a popup to authorize. Then you select what to transfer and where you want it do go.
 
This link is to a Denver post article that discusses this issue. Apparently there has been a good amount of backlash as you would expect, but the article also states that the company's revenue has doubled and you can imagine that their bandwidth usage has decreased significantly. I don't look for a drastic change in the policy.

If you are looking to imgur as an alternative, you might want to rethink that. The articles author linked to imgur's terms of service and it looks like using them as an alternative is a no go for third party hosting. https://imgur.com/tos
 
That CB in the pic above is beautiful!
 
Re: photobucket p500 issue

I use SmugMug, dumped Photobucket months ago. SmugMug host the AdventureRiders site. Very happy so far ;-)
 
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