Guess they'll file for bankruptcy soon...

In the last couple of years they already had turned very bloated, so I guess this happening was just a matter of time.

IMO vogons should host all of its own photos and not deal with these shitty file hosting sites. That way everything is preserved for the generations to come. Nothing worse than going to very old websites that still have posts to read but no photos, almost useless to keep going.

Does Photobucket put our pictures in hostage? Can we still download our uploaded pictures? Because, the last time I checked, I cannot download my Photobucket pictures; all downloaded pictures are blank.

Assuming this is actually something deliberate they intended to do, and not just the site fucking up as it has many times in the past, I guess it's time to abandon ship. My account on there is literally a decade old and has 1700 photos, but they finally managed to drive me away. 😜

Note to admins: now would be an excellent time to raise the per-post attachment limit to 10 or 15.

xjas wrote:

Assuming this is actually something deliberate they intended to do, and not just the site fucking up as it has many times in the past, I guess it's time to abandon ship.

Agree. But does Photobucket put our photos in hostage?

I just tried the "download album" function on one of my smaller albums and (after a bit of captcha rigamarole and ~30 seconds for it to prepare the download) was rewarded with a zip file containing all my photos from the album, in their original size, with filenames & creation dates intact. No idea what happens if you do it on your main album or anything with subdirectories though.

Note that this won't recover your animated gifs or videos, but it does seem to work otherwise.

I see.

Time to abandon ship nonetheless.

its like image shack all over again 😵
But hay, just host your images here, not like we don't have a good attachment system here. In fact most forums support attachments.

http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Photobucket

I sure hope imgur doesn't eventually go down the same path.

Otherwise I'm going to setup my own webserver out of my own house just to host images I want to show people...

I've been wanting to ditch for some time, and will gladly do so, if I find out an easy way to transfer all the images to a different service. Would rather avoid doing it all manually, but I guess even album-by-album is not such a bad thing, if the services allows you to easily upload a bunch of images into an album with a unique directory name, and has the same tweaks that Photobucket does.

Any recommendations?

Stiletto wrote:

http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Photobucket

I tried PB_Spade last night (the "spiritual successor" to PB_Shovel which stopped being maintained a couple years ago) but unfortunately all it recovered was a directory structure full of "bandwidth exceeded" images. So unless Archiveteam have done something magic with their version of PB_shovel I suspect it won't work. Definitely post up here if any of you try it & have success though.

Luckily I don't have a single pic on photobucket that isn't on my local storage, but the directory structure & date stamps would be nice to have for easier migration elsewhere.

DracoNihil wrote:

I sure hope imgur doesn't eventually go down the same path.

Otherwise I'm going to setup my own webserver out of my own house just to host images I want to show people...

I think for the images I post on this site alone, I might just resort into posting my build albums in the form of JPEGs and PNGs inside ZIP archives because I'm not too bothered to log onto another image host just to upload pictures of something I intend on posting on one site only when I know there's a better way, the possible issue with this method is that this could pose a problem for quick readers on mobile devices because AFAIK I don't know if it's possible to extract ZIP archives on like an iPad or something similar (the perks of being an avid desktop/laptop user I guess), but it's better for preservation, the 5MB file limit poses a hurdle for this task at this time so I guess for now there's a point in using imgur.

Personally, external image hosts have always been a pain in the posterior in my experience, especially with the risk of losing your images after a year or two (and not to mention excessive advertising), I never used PhotoBucket but I do know a friend who used it to upload images on his gaming forums, luckily most of them have been backed up and the ones that probably haven't are from at least 5 years ago and at this point I'm pretty sure those pics have been sent down the drain for years already so there was hardly any chance of rescuing those.

Just got the email myself and surely all my links broke. They are doing it in waves, apparently.

So, can anyone recommend a service that still allows hot-linking (preferably free, or for a one-time fee), and allows control of uploaded file names and their location in a hierarchy of folders? Basically, I would like to just mirror my Photobucket directory structure somewhere else, then edit all my posts with a single string search-and-replace to restore the links.

dr_st wrote:

can anyone recommend a service that still allows hot-linking (preferably free, or for a one-time fee), and allows control of uploaded file names and their location in a hierarchy of folders?

http://postimages.org is free and has a folder structure of sorts, I learnt about it here after the site I used started charging. (cant even remember who that was now)

I now just got an email myself in reference to the remote lining. Since I already got my images out (downloaded the albums), I'm now officially shutting down my account. A good number of images have been transferred to Imgur already. Since I'm not running any website, I should still be able to remote/hot link.

chinny22 wrote:

learnt about it here after the site I used started charging. (cant even remember who that was now)

Yeah, so far it seems nicest. Uploading is very easy as is organizing into folders, but it does scramble the names of images, and I found no way to change it till now.

Wordpress.com allows keeping the original names, but does not allow a directory structure.

I've been researching it a bit, and it does seem that for all its bloat and annoyance, Photobucket did have a rather unique combinations of features for a free service. Can't really say I'm surprised that they finally want to stop playing nice and friendly...