Linking Pictures from Photobucket

[Troy]

So it seems Photobucket as changed their policies regarding their "free" image hosting accounts. For that matter they've changed the paid accounts (like mine) as well. When you upload a picture to Photobucket then copy the <IMG> tag to put in your post here it is now considered by them to be "Third Party Hosting" and they disable it with a picture below. The only plan they have that allows this is $399 per year. Even if you pay the $399 they can still limit the bandwidth you use. If you have a Photobucket account and can still see your pictures here it's likely because your browser has them cached. It's unlikely that anyone else can see them.

I have been storing pictures there since they came into existence to cross post to forums (mostly car show and "how-to" pics) and for sharing with friends and family. I have an automated resizer to keep the quality but the file size is sometimes larger than what I can upload here so I just link everything. What really sucks is that there's 12 years of pictures on this site that are all going to disappear (or already have). It may very well decimate the tech section. This is certainly one of the pitfalls of "free" services. As of this moment I have plans to close my account and edit all of my posts here and on c-c.com. I cannot recommend to anyone to use Photobucket at this point for hosting pictures for forum posting.

Troy

[68X426]

Well damn, that sucks.  If other optional sites exist hopefully members will post about it here.

[1970Moparmann]

I'm assuming that this is for pictures moving forward because my pictures are still showing up.   Or, they haven't made it to my account yet.

[Drache]

I switched to Imgur years ago luckily

[Charger_Fan]

What a total dick move by Photobucket! They could of at least had the decency to give their members fair warning, so they wouldn't lose years of photos.
Sure, I can understand that if they are going to survive, they need to make money, but to go about it this way is total BS. Damn glad I don't use that site! I feel bad for the thousands of people & sites who are affected by this.

I use http://onfinite.com/ for mine & pay $1.99 per month. There's zero ads, and the pics can be linked pretty much anywhere. This site isn't the "perfect" site, because they periodically have issues. Like one time a few years ago someone hacked the site & about 60% of my photos were lost or severely corrupted. I was pretty pissed, however the internet is what it is. I learned to back up my crap after that! BUT since then, they have been about 90% reliable...the 10% part is when they have some glitch & it takes them a day or three to get it fixed.
So there's one place to chose from, for anyone interested.

[TexasStroker]

Yep, piss poor move on Photobucket's end.  All my old forum posts and write-ups utilized their hosting and everything is gone now.  $399 should buy 51% of the company...no one will pay that for one year to host a few images.  As others reported, I had tried to upload new pics for a project and their pages won't load...Want to upload?  Have a LH bottom corner ad instead.  Want to view your library?  Enjoy a blank page with an active header ad.  Absolutely ridiculous.

For what it is worth, most people have some sort of social media profile...if you right click your picture, click "Copy Image Address" and then paste that in the IMG Tags you should be able to work around this.  That said, the work around isn't too bad for NEW posts, but restoring other threads will be a complete pain

Even trying to click the place holder you get taken to Photobucket with the place holder image...trying to click the Direct Link to copy and paste has only netted me pop-ups and overlaying video ads.  Absolute shame...hopefully things can be restored, or re-created in future threads.

[alfaitalia]

I sent them a long email detailing my complaints and the fact that the very minimum they should have done is given us notice of the planned change......got an automated reply. Which just about sums up how much they care....sent another, much more "direct" email....no reply...surprise!

[bakerhillpins]

I've been making this argument on forums for years. Use the forum rather than the free crap.  If the forum dies, well it's all gone (single point of failure). If the picture host dies or the guy that posted moves on, ya get lots of useless info in searches (2 points of failure).

[AKcharger]

Is there a magic cure to resize pictures to 200k so they'll fit here? Or can we up the size limit? (I'll donate)

I made several how to "with pictures" now all gone.... 

[Troy]

There are several threads in the help section on resizing. I use IrfanView because it has a batch resize/rename feature. It can do a whole folder of car show pics in a couple minutes. For a bit more control I use "Paint.net" (it's a program not a web site). http://www.picresize.com has been recommended fairly often as well.

I can up the limit but not high enough to keep from having to resize. Even a basic camera these days puts out files over 1 MB.

Troy

[Troy]

Ok, I changed the settings to accept 8 attachments per post at up to 400 KB each. Unfortunately, the setting to avoid the duplicate file name error was removed from the software so I have to bring us all the way to the latest version to solve that problem.

Troy

[chapel40]

I use a twin Cessna forum. Its free and they have pics. Looks somewhat like this site. Ask them how they do it. Here is the link:

http://www.twincessna.org/forum/index.php

[Troy]

I use a twin Cessna forum. Its free and they have pics. Looks somewhat like this site. Ask them how they do it. Here is the link:

http://www.twincessna.org/forum/index.php

We have pics. We have a limit on the size allowed to be uploaded - as do most other forums.

Thanks for the reference but it's hard to tell anything about that site as you have to be a registered member to see most of it (which has also blocked Google and search engines from indexing it). A couple things though: they use a paid software package for the forum (ours is "free" and may have fewer features). Also, they are quite a bit smaller than we are - making server resources and bandwidth much less of an issue. For example, we have over 1.5 million posts and they have 44,000. We have over 220,000 uploaded pictures!

Troy

[family_dodge]

That's a risky move for the company. The website is already associated with a plethora of pop-up ads, making it virtually impossible to access information—goodness! It looks like the management is way ahead of the design/marketing team, pushing for revenue or something.

Here's the money quote from the press release:

John Corpus, CEO of Photobucket, said that historically the company "relied heavily on advertising revenue but that major industry-wide changes in the advertising space have greatly impacted Photobucket, including the rise of ad blockers and the Company's explosion of 3rd party hosting that generates zero revenue."

"This model is no longer sustainable," Corpus added.

[Troy]

As I mentioned earlier (another I believe), it's the default image storage for the Twitter app. I think Tapatalk was doing something similar. Since it seems their users seem to be primarily using the service for 3rd party hosting this is a giant deal! They had to know this was going to affect a large portion of their users. I'm assuming the high price is to recover the entire cost from the small number of users willing to pay (sounds like a government program!). They call it "reasonable" but I doubt that's the word most people will use.

I use an ad blocker and they managed to get around it on their site. (Geez, I wonder how bad it would be if I wasn't!) Again, they could have easily overlayed a watermark/ad so that 3rd party hosting would actually generate revenue. Knuckleheads. I don't think that model was ever sustainable but they probably didn't care as long as the investor money was pouring in.

Troy

[AKcharger]

Thanks for upping the size to 400kb that really helps! I'm S-L-O-W-L-Y repairing the damage on my posts

[Phillips68charger]

There are several threads in the help section on resizing. I use IrfanView because it has a batch resize/rename feature. It can do a whole folder of car show pics in a couple minutes. For a bit more control I use "Paint.net" (it's a program not a web site). http://www.picresize.com has been recommended fairly often as well.

I can up the limit but not high enough to keep from having to resize. Even a basic camera these days puts out files over 1 MB.

Troy

THis has been so frustrating. In 2021, why is there a 400kb limit? With all of our high resolution photos on our phones & cameras, we got to go back to 2001 websites just to get the photos we need to show for help on here or whatever? Makes no sense.

[Troy]

There are several threads in the help section on resizing. I use IrfanView because it has a batch resize/rename feature. It can do a whole folder of car show pics in a couple minutes. For a bit more control I use "Paint.net" (it's a program not a web site). http://www.picresize.com has been recommended fairly often as well.

I can up the limit but not high enough to keep from having to resize. Even a basic camera these days puts out files over 1 MB.

Troy

THis has been so frustrating. In 2021, why is there a 400kb limit? With all of our high resolution photos on our phones & cameras, we got to go back to 2001 websites just to get the photos we need to show for help on here or whatever? Makes no sense.

Because I pay for storage and bandwidth! When you upload a picture to any social media site it uses the "app" to shrink up the picture to a tiny size before transporting it across the internet. Then it shares the tiny, pixelated picture with the rest of the world. Seriously! Upload a picture to Facebook then save it back to your phone or computer and see if you get the same thing you started with. I just checked a bunch of mine and the average is 12KB. I just ran a test on Facebook with a 5472x3480 picture that was 14.6MB and it turned it into a blobby 960x540 at 127KB. That's 0.8%!!! Resized it myself to a 1360x765 jpeg with "good" quality and it came in under the 400KB limit - so, it shrunk by nearly 37 times but there's plenty of detail. Yes, it took more effort. Sorry the budget doesn't allow me to build/buy that technology for the site. However, you are more than welcome to pay the bills and I will raise the limit. (Then we get to read all the complaints about the massive pictures that are larger than the entire computer screen.)

Troy

[AKcharger]

I like that it takes effort to shrink the photos to post them, that helps "screen" photos that the author REALLY wants to post