Congratulations Dr. Sabet

[docfox]

You may already be aware that hundreds of forums have been crippled by the recent foul actions of Photobucket. Many of us have used their free service to store images and provide a URL to post an image in a forum for the last 10 years. With virtually no warning, they broke many thousands of these links replacing the image with this charming notice. Free and inexpensive account users were told their ability to post pictures could be restored by upgrading their account to one which costs $399/year.

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Dr. Sabet, you were very wise to design your forums with image storage space to avoid dependency on a third part hosting site. I participate in m4/3, Serious Compacts, Forever Film and Leica. None of my posted images on these forums has been corrupted and I haven't seen the dreaded photobucket replacement in any of your forums.

I can't say the same for other forums I have joined. I have posted a lot of things on boards discussing camera collecting, photography, shooting and pistol collecting. I face a major effort to restore those postings. The "kind" people at Photobucket made sure no trace of the links remained so that no global host replacement could be made.

 

[jyc860923]

Thanks Amin. When we were asked whether this site should cache our photos I was not sure that was a good idea but now I see the brighter side. Thank you for the decision and letting us members be a part making it.

 

[Robstar1963]

Well done Amin

 

[Hypilein]

400$ per year is a nice amount. They could just as well disable posting pictures.

 

[pdk42]

I guess they did it because if all you ever use are image links then their ads get no visibility and I guess they earn no revenue. It's probably a sign of things to come - the era of free internet services drawing to a close. The way Photobucket went about it is really ugly though - almost zero notice, no grace period or opportunity to fix links and then a ransom of $400. Crazy - how not to win friends and influence people.

Flickr still works, but I wonder if they'll pull the same stunt sometime soon?

 

[wolfie]

I guess they did it because if all you ever use are image links then their ads get no visibility and I guess they earn no revenue. It's probably a sign of things to come - the era of free internet services drawing to a close. The way Photobucket went about it is really ugly though - almost zero notice, no grace period or opportunity to fix links and then a ransom of $400. Crazy - how not to win friends and influence people.

Flickr still works, but I wonder if they'll pull the same stunt sometime soon?

Suppose the other hosting sites will wait and see if Photobucket gets itself into more difficulty after alienating so many "customers".

 

[kwalsh]

I was an early skeptic of caching, mainly down to some nuances as to how it was done and my negative experiences with it on some other sites. Besides the now glaringly obvious benefit of caching due to Photobucket the fact the Amin went out of his way to modify the caching implementation to alleviate the concerns of some users has made it an unambiguously positive feature of the site. Great job as usual Amin!

As to Photobucket there is nothing wrong with sustaining one's business model by changing features and terms over time. It is however unfathomably stupid to do so without warning and set a price ludicrously out of line with the market place (e.g. besides other "free" solutions which one might claim are susceptible to changing their terms as well, smugmug offers unlimited storage and 3rd party linking for $50/yr, zenfolio for $60/yr).

 

[ijm5012]

I guess they did it because if all you ever use are image links then their ads get no visibility and I guess they earn no revenue. It's probably a sign of things to come - the era of free internet services drawing to a close. The way Photobucket went about it is really ugly though - almost zero notice, no grace period or opportunity to fix links and then a ransom of $400. Crazy - how not to win friends and influence people.

Flickr still works, but I wonder if they'll pull the same stunt sometime soon?

To be fair, photobucket has been shit for quite some time now. Terribly slow website, numerous intrusive ads. I only ever used it to host pictures of stuff I was selling so that I didn't clutter-up my Flickr feed.

Regarding Flickr, now that it's owned by Verizon, anything is possible...

 

[CWRailman]

400$ per year is a nice amount. They could just as well disable posting pictures.

I own my own WEB site, CWRailman.com , with basically unlimited storage and it does not cost me that much for three years.

 

[Amin]

The "kind" people at Photobucket made sure no trace of the links remained so that no global host replacement could be made.

Thanks, @docfox! If any of the sites you lost photos on use XenForo, you can tell the admin that this addon will convert all current hotlinked images to attachments and at the same time restore the broken Photobucket images. They would have to change their TOS accordingly as we've done here.

The fact that that addon fixes broken/blocked Photobucket images on XenForo means there must be a way to do it on other board softwares.