Replacing Photobucket

[joemcg]

I have used the Photobucket site for years for pictures. Now it's become almost unusable because of the ads. What are others using that will allow pictures to be published here on the Cafe?
thanks.

Joe

[Mandolin Cafe]

I have used the Photobucket site for years for pictures. Now it's become almost unusable because of the ads. What are others using that will allow pictures to be published here on the Cafe?
thanks.

Joe

You can just upload them directly to the forum you know. That way they'll never disappear. Go back a few years and there are probably thousands of photos that have disappeared because someone thought it was a good idea to link from some photo sharing site that either went belly up or the let their subscription lapse.

That said, nothing wrong with these hosting sites. Personally we use flickr.com.

[Mandiff]

why don't u use Imgur?
It's the best photo hosting now. Easy to upload and manage your pics

[Jess L.]

why don't u use Imgur?
It's the best photo hosting now. Easy to upload and manage your pics

I'm not trying to be argumentative or anything, but I thought Imgur terms-of-service prohibited 3rd-party-hosting (hotlinking images) as well, just because Imgur currently chooses to selectively not enforce their own TOS, thus allowing hotlinking *now*, is no assurance they won't pull the plug at some point in the future... resulting in yet another migration to another image host...

A quote from the Imgur website:

"... don't use Imgur to host image libraries you link to from elsewhere, content for your website, advertising, avatars, or anything else that turns us into your content delivery network. If you do - and we will be the judge - or if you do anything illegal, in addition to any other legal rights we may have, we will ban you along with the site you're hotlinking from, delete all your images, report you to the authorities if necessary, and prevent you from viewing any images hosted on Imgur.com. We mean it."

I briefly considered Imgur when Photobucket recently broke my 2 dozen small low-res images that I had on Photobucket (ya sure like anyone's gonna pay $399/year, yup $399, NOT $3.99, for 24 measly low-res pics, don't think so), but the Imgur TOS made me reconsider. Even though, apparently, Imgur doesn't necessarily enforce it own rules (yet).

If a major player like Photobucket can change the rules in the middle of the game, then so could any other outfit. As the Admin mentioned up above a ways, there's no guarantee that any external website, whether free or paid, will even still be in business a few years down the road. Nothing's written in stone I guess.

[Spruce]

I have used the Photobucket site for years for pictures. Now it's become almost unusable because of the ads.

Photobucket became unusable because of a classic case of bait-and-switch...
Simple as that...
They said they would host your pics for free and allow you to share them to sites like this, then suddenly decided they would hold your pics as hostage unless you paid a fairly substantial sum per year...


Not a great business model if you want to remain in business....
...which they won't.

Personally we use flickr.com.

+1...

[Jess L.]

flickr.com

Hopefully Flickr being bought out by Verizon won't affect anything... quote:

"... Flickr users should, at least in the short term, not expect any major changes to the service as Verizon says it has no immediate plans to change Flickr pricing. ..."

[mrmando]

I'll look into Imgur. I've started using photos.google.com, but I have a lot of content I'll need to pull off of Photobucket.

I used 3rd-party hosting with my free Photobucket account for years. Last month I'm on vacation and I happen to check my website, only to discover it is unusable because Photobucket has replaced all my images. With no warning (the warning came a couple of weeks later). Spent part of my vacation replacing enough images to make the site work again, but there's more work to be done.

I have plenty of storage space in my domain, so the ultimate solution is to host all my own images. That will just take more coding.

[Jess L.]

... Photobucket has replaced all my images. With no warning (the warning came a couple of weeks later). ...

Same here, email notification 2 weeks *after* all my pics went offline.

Mostly the only place I used those pics was the MandolinCafe Social Groups, which have an unusual and somewhat non-intuitive picture-posting process whereby you first have to go the Song and Tune Projects forum and post the picture or audio file in the special Thread for Social Group MP3 posting, then manually copy that link, go then back to the Social Group and paste the link you just copied from the other forum... argh I've always had a hard time remembering that (hey, I'm old) so I finally gave up and just used Photobucket instead.

For some odd reason, unlike the main forum here, the Social Groups let you edit even really really old posts (at least that's the way it was a few days ago when I replaced all my dead Photobucket links), so it wasn't any trick to make the pictures show up again by manually re-uploading each of them from my computer to the special thread and then from there copying the links and editing the relevant Social Group threads... although it was time-consuming finding the exact threads that they belonged in. Google site-specific search made the process less tedious, plus I'd given the pics quasi-meaningful names which helped to narrow down where the heck they belonged. Just glad there was only a tiny number of them. Some of the images weren't all that earth-shatteringly important anyway and it might be years before anyone revisits some of those old threads, but I dislike the idea of missing images.

[sunburst]

Just today I got a pop up ad () from Dropbox suggesting that I store photos with them. (The "do not ask again" button was disabled.) Does anybody store photos there? I have the ones that I've sent stored there (as well as at least two other places) but that's all.
This thread reminded me, and I just backed up all of my mandocello photos! I still need to put them in my external hard drive though.

[Spruce]

This thread reminded me, and I just backed up all of my mandocello photos! I still need to put them in my external hard drive though.

Yeah, I can't imagine having a place like Photobucket being the only place your photos exist...
I mean, people are freaking out over this, as they are losing all their photos unless they pay up...

For me, it's a bummer that all the pics are lost on those long repair threads (the Whiteface A3 re-fin comes to mind), but I still have all the pics so it's no big deal...

[soliver]

Yea, Photobucket has really pooped the bed IMHO. I have used them for a very long time and have photos posted here and on other forums that are essentially unviewable now because they want me to pay them,... thats just STUPID. "Bait and switch" for sure, but to people who have used there service as long as many have?!?!? They basically ruined any posts that I have made to any forum that includes pictures for the last 5 years... just simply ridiculous.

[J.Albert]

If you don't have your photos stored on a local drive under YOUR control...
... you don't have your photos.