Photobucket ToS changes

nth-ing that Flickr has been a fairly good photo hosting site for a while now. That said, both Flickr and Tumblr were recently bought by Verizon (which is why Tumblr hasn't been showing the same ads to support net neutrality that they did the last time around), so it is possible that there are changes on the horizon. I pay for Flickr and it has been worthwhile; if you use a free account, they limit your photos to the most recently uploaded 200. Also agreeing that Tumblr isn't a good hosting service for photos outside of its own website (explanation and workaround here on a fanart blog).

I wrote a Tutorial about how to post pictures to DoA from Flickr a while back.

 

Thank you for the heads up. What a pain but I guess I will roll up the sleeves this weekend & change everything over.

 

Does anyone know how long it takes to get the link to download your PB album? They say it'll be sent to your email, but I've waited since last night and nothing. And it just gave me an error when I tried again. :/

 

This is beyond ridiculous. I've recieved their "we noticed that you've been using PB for 3rd party hosting" email and was like "well duh, that's what sites like yours are for?", then noticed all my links were broken.
Thankfully, I've been using Flickr for years for my "main" pics and PB only for my sales, but it still was a pain in the butt to migrate everything to servimg.
I immediately deleted my account afterwards.

 

Photobucket has been going downhill for years. When I first started using it almost a decade ago, there wasn't so much advertising and it was never as slow as it's become in recent years. I found it incredibly cumbersome to navigate, and honestly, I won't miss it!

 

Is there a deadline for being able to move out photos over? Because I'm a super busy person, and really don't have the time to move all 600+ photos across and fix all the broken links immediately. Plus I'm sure there will be photos I'll inevitably miss.
Edit: I realise that we can see all our previous posts, does this also count the posts we made before the forum changed? If so this might makes things a little easier.

 

Oh no, why did they do this. So far all pics on my sale threads work, but I have to move all pictures away from PB asap. Its been working so horrible slow lately anyway and I was already planning to move anyway. Just have to find a good substitute for it. I already have Flickr but don't want to put all the sometimes crappy sale pictures there too. I rather have them somewhere somehow hidden place and just get the links. I already tried to test Google+ but I didn't get the links to work on DoA. Is there any specific trick on to get them working here?

 

I am having a hard time finding the bbdode links...they will not let me share anything HELP!

 

Dollpage has a new short term hosting site: Picturehost by TheDollPage.com
It should be great for sales items, etc.

 

I'm not sure if you saw this, but here's a tutorial of how to get the BBCode! Also, make sure you have the photo set to public (the default is private) and that you post the BBCode directly into your post on DoA and not into the IMG URL section. Hope this helps a bit!

 

The tutorial does not mention that you must be using a pc or laptop. It doesn't work from a cellphone.

 

I AM able to post a picture from postimage from my phone

 

Just for me I had 2 ways could use sharing links.

1: I had used DeviantArt it's could working. First open the picture which you had uploaded on DA, and then click the right mouse button find 'Copy Image Address' from the menu, at last you could got image links, you just need paste this links in 'Image' or . I had used it for my 2 threads what I had posted at last month.

2: No matter which photo website you will use, you just try to find the links looks like: [http://*******.jpg]
(For example) http://img08.deviantart.net/67e9/i/2017/177/7/3/003_by_nalisinko-dbe3e6l.jpg It has '.jpg' at the end of part, then this link code could in use, even though you could got some links like Flickr has long code, for example: <a href="#"><img src="http://www.deviantart.net/67e9/i/2017/177/7/3/003_by_nalisinko-dbe3e6l.jpg" width="50px" height="30px" /></a> At here you need find and pick up the code like [http://www.deviantart.net/67e9/i/2017/177/7/3/003_by_nalisinko-dbe3e6l.jpg] and then paste it into your thread.

Of course you could try to click the right mouse button find 'Copy Image Address' from the menu first, it's really easy and useful, If this way doesn't working you could try the second way.
PS: The second way usually used with some website allowed and gave you sharing link. Maybe you could try to find 'link' from web page source code, but maybe it will be little hard.


Those advice just from Code study primary level what I had studied, hope it could help to everyone ^^

 

Don't forget to turn off automatic subscription payments to Photobucket in PayPal if your were paying for their advertisement free upgrade.

I thought that Flickr frowned on this and has even deleted accounts if they noticed too many outside of Flickr hits on photos? I have personally gotten a warning email from the Flickr staff for posting photo links on DOA. I always used the "static" links which I understood to be the least troublesome to Flickr.

 

I prefer to use a site that specifically permits 3rd party hosting.

When I first signed up with flickr, they prohibited 3rd party hosting. I understand flickr is now owned by Yahoo and I don't think they will like a lot of old photobucket users from using there site for posting photos.

 

That seems strange to me; I don't think they'd offer BBCode links if they weren't expecting people to post outside Flickr.

They do ask that people don't delete the little tag line beneath photos shared with BBCode. I guess they want people to be able to find the site the photo is hosted on easily. Really subtle advertising, I guess. It may be they only like people using BBCode or HTML code with links for that reason.

Of course, I'm not a Flickr advertiser or anything, haha~ I've just found it really convenient and easy.

 

I will put my vote again for Flickr. I did in one day with Flickr, what I'd been working on (and not even gotten 3/4 of the way done) for three days with Imgur (although I did kinda commit all of yesterday to uploading photos and updating my gallery threads and just powered through it).

Today I went and tried to update as many of my posts with images as I could. Sadly, in older locked threads, I can't fix the broken image links. I wonder what will happen to those broken images... I mean, the threads are archived, so it probably wouldn't be horrible to just leave them broken... and it would be a great shame to delete half the old threads because posts contain broken images due to PB being despicable jerks, but I do wish there was a way to fix them. :/ It makes me sad to think of all the lost images...

I really love how Flickr organizes my photos in my camera roll by 'date taken' which sets them up all neat and tidy for me! (I can be fairly OCD about how things are organized, so Flickr makes that easy for me and calms my OCD tendencies, thankfully.)

 

I will happily give a "thumbs-up" for Smugmug. I went with them last year after the whole DollPage debacle, and Photobucket and Flickr were not good options for me, for a lot of the reasons already hashed over in this thread. Yes, it is a subscription-based platform, but in the year that I have been using it, I've not had a single problem with it as a hosting platform--no crashes, no weirdness with pictures not showing, etc. (And I take and post tons of pictures...) The stability of the platform is well-worth the price of the price of the subscription, IMO, especially if you are a prolific photo poster.

 

Also recommending Flickr. Their fees for an upgraded account are quite reasonable and there's a nice BJD community on there as well. Ipernity is good, but they charge a fee for unlimited storage.

 

It took me 5 tries just to delete my account because of all the popup ads. I will have to go back to my DVD saved photos and upload some of my stories on to Flickr.
Greedy people make me mad.

 

I've attempted to download photos from PB several times - tried testing with single albums at a time, and even single photos - hardly anything has successfully down-loaded. I did eventually get the emails, but not the down-loads (only a very few photos downloaded). I suspect this might be because so many people are trying to download their pictures at the same time. The site is being very uncooperative today in general.

Very irritating, especially because I literally have thousands of art, nature, and doll photos that I've posted on PB over the past 12 years (I shudder to think of all of the broken links of my stuff, and other follks' stuff, that will be littering the internet soon).

Fortunately, I do have all of my photos on our personal external hard-drive, so they're safe. But I know I won't have the time or energy to re-do all of my 10 years of blog and DoA, etc. posts. I've been slowly deleting broken image links on my DoA gallery posts, and marking them for deletion, and am only re-doing the image links on those I'm particularly sentimental about, or really love the photos.

I've also been slowly (because of the baulky PB site) deleting my pictures there, prior to closing my account. It's been a paid account for 12 years, and I was paid up through January 2018 - I strongly suspect I won't get a refund of that fee when I close it (early).

I do have a little free account that I've used for years as emergency backup - but will be going with SmugMug, which I think will suit my purposes for photo hosting.

 

Oh... FLickr won't host more than 200 photos for the free account? (even if they are small in size?) So you have to pay for the Pro account (around $60 a year)? --and will they still have problems with 3rd Party sharing after that?

Smugmug is a little cheaper. Are they cool with unlimited photos and 3rd Party sharing?

I'm really not sure what to do. I don't really trust putting all my photos in one photo-host, but I can't be paying for a bunch of them...

 

I had no problems uploading more than that. I have 712 photos uploaded into my camera roll on Flickr. However, they are set to private... so maybe it's just a limit of 200 public photos?


I've been uploading all of my box opening photos to that postimage.org site as well... I'm thinking having multiple places might not be a horrible idea...

 

I have over 3000 public photos on Flickr and have no problems.

 

I don't think there's a set limit of images you can post. I believe free accounts come with 1 terabyte of storage. So...200 images max if you put up 1-2 gig sized images apiece?

 

Smugmug is offering s free trial!

 

One thing I've found helps on my separate free account is to put everything in albums. For some reason the main photostream only shows the past 200, but every album I've ever created allows me to access every photo I've uploaded and attached to an album through there.

One other thing I remember from back in 2008 before I ever had a paid account at all is that every image remains viable. If you put it in a forum post, it will show up even if it passes the 200 cutoff on the home website.

 

I've currently switched my PB over to Ipernity. You do have to be a club member (paid account) for unlimited uploading but there doesn't seem to be anything about 3rd party hosting restrictions. I also think their organizational abilities are better than flikr (at least for me). Still have to go through and work on changing all my links - for now my PB is paid through August so I haven't gotten the email or blocked pics yet.

 

I was looking over Flickr's accounts in brief and it said that the amount of storage was the same for Flickr and Flickr Pro/Pro+ ($50/60). Hmmm... I might keep going with my transfer there, then. If I have to start paying, I won't mind. I think a fair price for a service is fine. I'd have kept paying Photobucket if their price and service was reasonable... but I suspect they want to kick a bunch of people off and reform their service in a different way.

Thanks for the info on other sites, like ipernity and postimage... I'll definitely check them out.

I did a search using that method of entering in part of my photobucket and user URL and got 10 pages of 20 posts each with images...!!! Yikes. I'll probably get very tired of fixing all the links and just abandon many of those 200 posts (many with multiple images).

 

I'm definitely not observing this at all. I've been pushing my Photobucket images to Flickr so I can update older posts; I'm currently at 1,694 photos, all visible. The "photostream" only goes out 17 pages, but it's not an effective way to deal with photos anyway, and everything is fully accessible through my albums.

 

Thanks, vicemage! I'll continue to upload old PB photos to flickr for now (I'm getting used to how it works). Flickr seems to allow for a lot of storage space, so I hope it will work for now. If I have to pay, I will. I don't mind that. I guess I should read all the ToS on these places to make sure! But people have been on Flickr for many years, so it can't be that bad... Hopefully they won't go bad like Photobucket!

 

As far as I can tell, they offer unlimited photos and 3rd party sharing for all levels, although they don't explicitly call it 3rd party sharing. At the moment, they're offering a 14 day free trial - so one can play on their site and decide if it's the best choice before taking the plunge. I would also suggest reading up on what the different account levels offer.

 

I've been posting like crazy from SmugMug on my LJ and here on DoA for the past year, and I've never had any issues with them.

 

if you need to dl your pics get at it .. that site is running like it's on dial up ><

 

Honestly, I hate when people remove the link. My favorite part about Flickr hosting is being able to easily see people's other photos! I'm mean, you do you, of course, but honestly its a great way to get more views on your photos and such!

 

*GROAN!! * Me too! 12 years of doll shows, simultaneously down the tubes?! :X

 

Well, my reasoning is that I mostly use Instagram for my best doll photos now and Flickr more for sales posts and specific informative things that need a photo, so I don't really care much about views or comments there. To be honest, my Flickr is rather boring and disorganized and considering the types of photos I share on the forum, I feel the extra info clutters things up and isn't very useful in my case. However, I can definitely see your point for those who do lots of gallery threads!

 

Anyone else wondering how many people are going to jump ship from photobucket after this? XD

 

On Wiki, they claim 100 million users... I'd bet 75%... or more. They seem to want to chase everyone off... I'm sure some people who could afford it are still paying up so that their images won't be broken. However, it's very likely this will kill off Photobucket, so even if they pay their $400, there's no guarantee PB won't just up and declare bankruptcy on them!

It's sad... I feel for everyone who has a decade or so of blogs or websites or forum posts messed with. There could be around a billion broken photo links floating about... now or in the near future.

A big chunk of the old threads here on DoA will be affected by the broken links problem...

 

if they are not already and you need them on your pc... batch them into albums and dl albums and you can upload to flickr faster than you can get the crap off the bucket... trust me on this one... do it in bunches and it's easier to sort in Flickr with 'camera roll' that is a nifty feature...

 

regarding Flickr, their free account has the following benefits:

• 1 TB of photo and video storage
• Upload videos of up to 1GB each
• Upload photos of up to 200 MB each
• Video playback of up to 3 minutes each
• Limitless downloads of your original photos

So don't afraid, it is a really good solution.

 

You can also really easily sort photos into albums in Flickr when uploading (and unlike PB, Flickr allows a photo to be in multiple albums, which for me at least makes it a lot easier to find them! "Did I put that picture into album X or album Y...?")

I went through and downloaded all my BJD albums last night, threw them onto Photobucket, and swapped out everything I had here using the tip someone else gave to search by my PB username, so it actually went fairly quickly. (And thanks to the mods who helped out with the older locked threads!)

 

The real toil is turning out to be replacement here on DoA. I'm not even a prolific photographer, but I have nine pages of gallery threads to replace. And I'm laughing at my need to spam every new doll in every possible thread! I managed to replace all images of one guy out of twenty-five last night, and he's not even a favorite.

 

This is really a pain in the *&^%$%! Downloading my entire album of photos from Photobucket was easy, but there is no way in heck I will pay them. Guess Flickr is my next choice, this bites!

 

I'm just not even trying to replace images at this point. According to Photobucket (left them a scathing message) since I am paying them (for the 20 Plus) my photos are safe until after December, so I've time. I also have a Flickr account so I just need to transfer photos as needed. Most of mine are also on my computer & removable hard drive.
This will kill Photobucket of course.

 

Replacing all the photos I have posted from Photobucket is a big daunting task. I post lots of photos. Lucky for me I filled up my free account about two years ago and went to Flickr after that.

I just worked on my first gallery post...and it took awhile to do. The only good thing was it was kind of fun revisiting that thread. LOL It was done seven years ago.

Time flies for sure.

 

I think I replaced images of one of my guys... He's my first, Elf El "Elurin", so he's had 13 years of photos!

And I replaced links in 20 threads/posts, last night (I'm kind of dead this morning, thank goodness it's Saturday).

Heh... Yes, it was tempting to update everything as I go along, thinking that I have more dolls I could add in! So far, I've resisted!

-------------

If my PB account allows, and if DoA allows (in terms of time allowed), I may be able to replace most of my photos. I didn't think I'd keep most of my posts, but some are kind of cool--revisiting cons and meetups and gallery threads that I haven't seen for years! It's kind of a walk down memory lane!

I've not bothered uploading my larger files to Flickr which is a bit of a shame... Just uploading the small BBC-friendly sizes. It's just quicker that way. Yes that size is crap resolution, but oh, well. Most people are viewing online anyway. I'll upload larger files maybe, when it comes to newer and better (hopefully) photos...

 

How did you access posts in locked threads? Did you report your post and include a new link? I'd love to do that... but I don't want to swamp the mods with reports just so they can fix my old broken images... :/ I have a lot I'm sure...

 

I gave up on downloading albums from my Photobucket account as it was so horribly slow it did not work properly. I just deleted them all and requested that my account is deleted too. Bye, bye Photobucket. Not that I will miss it with the ton of adverts all the time.
Luckily I have been using photobucket for a few years only and I posted pictures from there only on DoA, but I feel the pain of those who have used Photobucket for decade - that must be really painfull to correct all the links .

Now there awaits the funny part to correct links to my new Flickr account.

EDIT: Big thanks to DoA admins that you let us know about the change!
I found out that the message from Photobucket was automatically redirected to spam folder in my google account, so it would took me longer to notice why the links to pictures are broken without your help.

 

Yes, that's exactly what I did. (I posted in "Ask the Mods" and that's what I was told to do about them.) I just reported the post as "please replace image" with the new BBCode from Flickr for each one, and I think most of them are done now. Luckily, I didn't have too much in locked threads....

 

Oh, well if they told you to do that, then I guess I will try it too. I'll start with the newest posts and if it gets to be too many, I'll stop. :P

Probably won't start on it just yet... still working on tidying up some of my other stuff.

I will say that I was pleasantly surprised at how many of my older photos were actually fine because I posted from deviantArt, not PB. Will probably be doing that mostly from now on (in threads that will eventually be locked).

 

No point in having an bucket account now, Who will join me in closing their accounts and boycotting the bucket forever?

 

I have an Ad-free account so I think it's good until my renewal date in September, but I am updating llnks as fast as I can and will certainly close the account ASAP!

 

It is unfortunate. Ever since PhotoBucket messed up and redirected forum users through one of my hosted photos to an "adult" content ad spam site, I have cut ties. That was terribly embarrassing and infuriating.

I don't know what happened to them, why such poor business and security decisions have been being made, but at this point it will be for the content consumers' good to abandon them despite the inconvenience of moving our photos elsewhere.

My sincere thanks, DoA, for the big bright notification and for understanding it's not us users being dummies.

 

So, their making people pay just for uploading photos?

 

Man this sucks. If you don't have a PC (like me) then Flickr is impossible to use for posting doll photos to here. I've tried and the share links they don't work and the full website runs like dog poop on mobile. I have to use Tumblr for all my sales posts and that sucks

 

Try postimage.io. I was able to post a photo with my phone.

 

I'm finding that it takes me less time to right click and download all of my old images directly from the old thread than it does to download the recalcitrant PB album. I have verified that I am not a robot so many times that I'm starting to feel like a bot.

Reiterating for people trying to decide where to put their content from now on that WordPress is super easy to use from your phone. You can build an entire site via mobile!

 

Hang on a sec... okay I've re-read this thread, and I was under the impression that our buckets would still have our photos in them, we just won't be able to share them. Did I read this wrong?
If so, are they nuking everyone's accounts, like wiping all the pics from existence? I work this weekend so I don't have the time to dedicate to re-saving pics right now (3-11:30pm shift woo). Is there a set date where accounts will be "locked"? Just a few weeks ago I had an issue of being locked out of one of my buckets (there are three)...

 

You just won't be able to link them. They will still be there.