Photobucket ToS changes

I got a photobucket but hadn't used it in years. My dolls are mostly old anyhow and users here don't care to see them. So I seriously doubt anyone will be looking for mine.

 

So, a few days after my rush of anger and frustration, I can't help but review Photobucket's actions from a business perspective. We're all thinking "how can they even dream of keeping their customer base after doing this?" Well, maybe that's the entire point. 75% of PB's expenses come from maintaining the servers for all the photos loaded into their 'free' accounts. And they're not getting any kind of income from those accounts, other than the massive amounts of ads. Their ad revenues as well as unique site visits are declining and they are definitely profit focused at the moment. So what if they decided to take the nuclear action to their business?

I don't know for sure that this is what they're doing, but I do know that they would have at least checked out their competitors' prices. Maybe they deliberately set the price for 3rd party hosting so high, trying to kill off the majority of the drain on their servers. Then, maybe 3rd quarter or early next year, they could roll out either a full site redesign, or a set of 'adjusted' account levels with lower prices, or even try to rebrand themselves as a different company altogether.

IF that is their strategy though, they really needed to talk to someone in marketing or promotion about online reputation and customer goodwill. I know a lot of people who wouldn't go back to PB now even if they did resume full 3rd party hosting for free accounts, just based on how they handled this situation. But there's not a clear service provider to step in and fill the gap now, as evidenced by all the discussion in this thread. And some people/businesses are paying the $400 (however reluctantly), until they can get their accounts in order and find a substitute.

Speaking of substitutes: I have a question about Flickr. When you upload an image, does it automatically detect the camera information somehow? Or do you have to enter that in? I'm just browsing some Flickr pages, and a lot of the pictures have the exact camera used to take the shot listed on the page.

 

@lilly22 Flickr automatically detects it, but you can set it to not display that information.

 

That's just it though, just based on this move, I imagine they are going to lose most (if not almost all) of both their non paying AND their paying customers (after all, if I were a paying customer, I would actually probably be heading for the hills even faster, because I would NOT want to give my money to a company that practices such underhanded methods). If they had handled the transition better, I would probably consider staying (if I were a paying customer and they offered a cheaper plan), but the way they handled this? No way. I am not giving one cent of my money to a company that treats their customers/users like garbage. Paying or non.

 

Not true, for me at least. I probably wouldn't search for it, but if someone goes to the effort of uploading a photoshoot I want to see it regardless of sculpt.

Yes. It's called EXIF information and all images taken by a digital camera (including phones) will have it. It contains stuff like exposure values, lens and body serial numbers and GPS coordinates if your device has a GPS, and your name if you've set copyright or owner information. A provider like flickr will strip out anything identifying, but you should be aware of privacy implications of sharing photos on other mediums.

 

Have I missed the information on how to fix links in locked threads????
Perhaps it could be made into a sticky at the start of this thread.

 

you don't 'fix'... you have to 'replace' photobucket links with an alternative link like flickr... the bucket links will be useless and you will neen another place to share pics from (I doubt you will be paying the 400$ and that's they only way to make the PB links work)

 

I don't think you can replace photos in locked threads. There is no edit option.

 

There's no edit option, but I reported my own posts with the link for the new Flickr image and a request to please update it, and the mods were able to take care of it for me.

 

Boy are they going to be busy

 

omg that felt so gooooooooooooood.... told off PB and deleted my account! And all my stuff, that i think is already saved is double backed up now in zip files

 

Oh! They will busy for years!
I guess this at least means we don't need to fret about threads being deleted quickly then. I wonder if the Mods would like us to send in one link at a time?

 

I reported single posts, with all the links (in order) in the report, to reduce the number of reports to deal with.

 

Wow! What a jerk move from PB. $400/year is waaaaay too much to pay for photo hosting. A website only costs about $10/month. Absolutely ridiculous cost.

 

Was planning to leave Photobucket anyway.

Their editor tool went to crap. Then they had insane ads and popups, felt like a minefield of viruses. And it was hard to copy links. The old reliable website I have been using forever has been replaced by something useless, frustrating, and scary.

This is simply the last push I needed to close my very old account after yanking my images.

 

now if flickr would just get off is arse and get theirs running again I'd be thrilled

 

Wow, this is really disheartening. I have hundreds and hundreds of pictures out there on various forums from the past 11 years. There's no way I could transfer all of them over.

 

Speaking of which I hit the edit button on Flickr and tad-ah the editor popped open. Haven't tried it yet but I didn't get the white screen of "So sorry."

 

@lilly22 I'm inclined to agree. They aren't worked about losing their non paying AKA ad revenue only customers because they don't want these customers. Setting the price higher than anyone would reasonably pay feels like it must be deliberate.

Casual users won't pay it, and business users can get hosting far cheaper elsewhere. This must be a deliberate attempt to take the strain off their servers.

I'm not deleting anything. Why should I free up storage for them because they blackmailed me?

 

okay now i can crop and fix light/color all in one place.. BUT... only TWO picture frames O_o ... and they are 'both' white???? stingy cuz that i did use. and The little preview box for 'filters'... all look the same LOL annoying... and why did it flip my pic on it's side? Oh well .. got the basic crop back and that is nearly essential to me

 

I'm really sad that it won't let me download my albums, but I may try again later since it could be due to high traffic on the site. Gonna save them to my external hard drive if I can. Anyone else been having trouble downloading full albums? (Also when I click on an individual photo, it won't show.)

 

Depends on how many photos are in the album. I had trouble with ones that had lots of photos. The smaller ones were pretty quick.

 

I have found it works best late in the evening, about 9 PM Pacific time. Check the downloaded files!

 

I am on deviant art. Can I put my pictures on there and then load them here on DOA?
I dont pay for any fees on deviant art so will I still be able to post pictures there and use them here or will I have to pay membership fees in order to use them?
I tried uploading my pictures on deviant art but they wouldnt go?????
I am so intimidated by these tech things. I just get used to one way and I have to change to another...uhh..sooo frustrating. Why didnt den of angels just leave it the old way were I could use pictures from my photo album.
Sorry,

 

I do not believe DeviantArt permits using their service as an image host (which is why it's obfuscated how to do it). And DoA did not make this change (and is also not an image host).

I personally find Flickr easy to use, as it allows batch processing, editing, sorting into (multiple) albums, and auto-generates bbcode for you at whatever size you need.

 

A long time ago, I used to work for an ISP who also ran a small site hosting business. And one thing I have learned is that hosting stuff is not cheap. It costs a lot of money. Every time someone looks at a picture on the internet, it costs money to the company that is hosting it.

So, I guess I can say that I sorta understand where PB is coming from, especially if most of their users are non-paying members. However, I think the way they are going about getting the income to continue supporting their hosting costs is just bad form. They could have offer tiered services, that allows 3rd party hosting, not just the highest tier.

And guys, I believe (and I hope that I am wrong) that just moving to another free hosting provider would only be a temporary solution. Eventually even Flickr and other hosting sites will have higher operating costs, especially with the addition of so many new users. They may have to place a fees system as well eventually. If this does happen, I hope they handle the costs in a more graceful manner.

 

I dunno if this would help some folks trying to retrieve old pictures, but has anyone tried using the Wayback Machine? It is an archive of the internet. I didn't have much success in regards to DoA (can't log in on a copy of the forum), but perhaps there are other sites that don't require a login that certain pictures can be found.

Just thinking in type...

 

Well, there's fees and then there's "Pay me several hundred bucks a year or else ..." ...

 

Has anyone else gotten an offer for a "monthly" option for the 500 Plus plan? I haven't opened it yet to see how much that will be!

 

okay, I got a flickr account, can anyone tell me how I take photos from flickr account to update my sales threads on the Market place ( what I need to copy/paste etc...) Since no more use for photobucket?

 

First, make sure your photo is set to "Public." (It should already be if you haven't changed settings.) Click the picture, then click the arrow in the bottom righthand corner. Click the "BBCode" tab on the resulting popup, and copy the coded link it gives you. Then just click "Edit" on your MP thread and paste the copied code where the broken picture was. Viola! (This doesn't work on the Flickr app or mobile site though. You have to be on the PC version of Flickr.) (Also, don't use the "Insert Image" box that DoA gives as an option. Just post the BBCode directly into the text box.)

 

Hello! I made a quick tutorial for people moving over to flickr that I hope is some help. If the mods find this useful, please feel free to post it in a more visible location!

You can see the original image by going to flickr if this one is too small. Text instructions are below.

flickr doa tutorial by SmoteyMote, on Flickr

1. Click the cloud+arrow shape in the upper right corner.

2. A window opens that you can either drag and drop your images into or click to choose your images from a file.

3. Once your image has uploaded you can give it a title and description.

4. Consider adding tags to help other people find your image! Add specific sculpt information, faceup artist, wig/eye/clothing makers, etc. If you want to have the tag contain two separate words, use quotation marks around the phrase like this: "single tag". Without the quotation marks, the tag would become two separate tags like this: single, tag

5. If you want to be more organized you can add your images to albums you've created. This isn't necessary but certainly helps find stuff or link stuff later! You can create a new album here or add stuff to albums later.

6. If you want to be part of the flickr community more actively, add your images to groups. You will need to join groups before uploading in order to add your images to them.

7. You can use the owner settings tab to create more specific restrictions on who can use or view your work.

8. Ready to post? Click the blue "Upload [number] Photo(s)" button in the top right corner of the screen and then click "Upload" on the pop-up box.

9. You should see your image show up in your photostream shortly after.

10. Ready to post to DoA or other forum? Click the curved arrow icon (between the notepad icon and the down-arrow icon).

11. Select BBCode from the list along the top.

12. Choose what size you want your photo to post to DoA (I recommend Medium 640). Copy (control+c or command+c) the text.

13. Navigate to your comment box on the forum and Paste (control+v or command+v) your text directly into the comment box. DO NOT choose the image icon as it will duplicate your bbcode tags and mess up the image. There is no need to use that icon when posting from flickr.

Good luck and happy photo sharing!

 

..... wow okay if there is a 'section' for tutorials this needs to be there AND Mods need to get this linked to the teaching page and i know exactly how dot let them know! XD

EDIT: i sent is as a 'report post' to see if this can be added to the FAQ for picture sharing ^^... Reporting posts is a handy thing to get mods attention on something other than infractions...

 

Thank You, so much!

 

That's really disappointing, Photobucket was my go to image host for quite some time. I've used imgur for images on other sites, and it works pretty well (just check the privacy settings first.) Has anyone used that for DoA?

 

This is really disheartening. I have two photobucket accounts, one of them going all the way back to 2003 I believe. At one point I paid for the unlimited storage but once the economic depression set in, I couldn't afford it so I haven't paid for it in years. I have 14-15 years of photos over two accounts to try to download (and I get this wonderful message "Hmmm. Something didn't click. Want to give it another shot? Try again now." in every web browser I have tried) photos from since I am not 100% certain if I have copies elsewhere (I know some of them I do not because that external hard drive died and I have yet to try to send it off to a data recovery company - nobody I knew could get anything off of it and I fear everything on there is lost forever - photobucket at least held some photographic evidence of places I have been, people I have met, things I have done).

But if everyone moves to flickr, they might come down hard on 3rd party hosting as well.

@nancy_schroeder_ca What browser do you recommend using to download the albums from? I saw your recommended time frame so I will try again in a while but if you have a preferred browser, I will go with that.

 

I've been using Firefox. Good luck!

I'm getting the same thing now! Weeknights may be better.

 

I keep getting that same error message...I already sent an email asking for help on what to do. I am only human, I have to sleep sometime but I guess the weekends are a no go for downloading.

 

I was able to download individual pictures. But it was a small album. And be sure to check the files after you download! I have had bad downloads on albums and individual pictures.

 

you won't lose access to your pics or the ability to dl them... so as far as time frame you are safe for qite a while.. but in reality there is very little use for pics on there so there is no point using them... ONE person did say they have all their stuff backed up off PB but plan to leave their stuff thier (just to eat up their storage space LOL)...

 

Well I would like to download images just in case they do decide my nonpaying accounts are deleteable without my consent.
Plus, I have some sales images I need to put things on ebay.

 

I had thought about downloading some Photobuckets, since a lot of old fanart collections from fandoms I belonged to got stored there too, which is why I checked some of my bookmarks.

For the ones who think about linking straight to your album(s) or account, and thus technically not hotlinking a single picture, I got to tell you this won't work either.
I actually went through someone's album, and while in the album I can see the pictures just fine clicking on them to see them on their own just ends up with being greeted by this pesky PB placeholder image
It's absolutely ridiculous that even while browsing PB this happens. I tried searching for an image and then moving to someone's account, their album, then an image in the album and it was the same.
I feel like I'm being punished because someone else decided not to get a subscription (rightfully so), and it makes their whole website pretty much unusable.
Especially because you at first can navigate without an issue till you suddenly want to see a picture outside of its thumbnail.

Browsing the web has been pretty depressing lately, so many dead PB links on so many websites

 

Finally made it to under 300 photos replaced...I'll have to continue it after the anniversary event...so busy...

 

I also used Photobucket until they changed their terms. I am trying to use Flickr now but I cannot get it to work. I am using an Ipad with the Flickr app. I chose the share button, then the copy url button but when I paste into DOA it gives a funny looking, short url and I get an error message. The picture won't post. Does anybody who is more savvy at this know what I am doing wrong?

 

can you switch to "PC" view?... some of the 'apps' don't work well with Flickr... using browsers and PC view can help or so i've read

 

Also, if you can, paste a copy of the url here that you're trying to use so we can see if there's a clue there.

 

When i just go onto Flickr using my browser, the copy function does not work. With the flickr app, this is what I get when I copy the url:

"Lati White Special Jia searching for new mommy!"

That is the description of the picture. Is it just copying the link? I used to select copy bbcode, whatever that means, but the app doesn't give me the option.

 

This is the actual url that's in there:

Code:

[URL='https://flic.kr/p/YeJAcP']Lati White Special Jia searching for new mommy![/URL]

What you're actually looking at is likely the url for the display page the photo is in. The photo url itself would be the simple http and then a name ending in a .jpg. If nobody familiar with the flickr app comes on soon, I'll see whose brains I can pick offsite--

 

@Minigrace

The last time I checked (several months ago) there was no way to get BBcode from either 1) The Flickr app or 2) the mobile site, making it impossible for me to do on my phone. It was a known problem with multiple pages in the support communities.

BBcode looks like this: [img]https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4370/36796313520_0ee963dc28_z.jpg[/img][/url][url=https://flic.kr/p/Y4yJ3C]Poseability_AngelStudio[/url] by BabylockSewing[/url], on Flickr

You find it on the regular site by clicking the share arrow at the bottom righthand corner of the image you wish to insert and then a dialogue box will pop up. The last tap at the top righthand corner of the dialogue box is BBcode. I added the emojis to break the code so that the text would show up. This particular one seems fitting because the Flickr developers have a broken app and mobile site.

 

Thank you! That explains why I cannot get it to work. Time to fire up the old laptop! I am just accustomed to using my ipad now

 

from your Ipad.... go into 'browser' type viewing and make sure the page is set for PC view and not the other

 

@Lady Tiku

Can you switch to desktop view on mobile? I couldn't figure out how to do that on my phone, and the user forums seem to think you can't do this either, but perhaps Flickr has updated their site.

 

@Minigrace and others: on iPad or iPhone, you can download the Google Chrome browser, which does have an included "Request Desktop Site" feature. You have to manually navigate to Flickr on the Chrome browser, and tell your phone/iPad that you do not want to open the Flickr app. Then you should be able to click the "Request Desktop Site" button from the Chrome options in the top left corner.

There is a tutorial for posting from Flickr to DoA located here. It will work exactly the same for iPad/iPhone once you have opened the desktop version of the site through the Chrome browser.

 

Using both Safari and Google Chrome on Ipad, I am able to go to the Flickr website instead of using the Flickr app. I can locate the BB code but am unable to copy it as the copy feature does not work on Flickr. Normally you just click into the box and you get the option to select all and then choose copy. You can click at the beginning of the code and attempt to drag the bar across the code to select it to copy but it won't work.

 

@Minigrace, Instead of using the BB code, use the second half of the tutorial, the one where you use the static URL of the picture. From the desktop page in Chrome, you can hit the download button (looks like an arrow pointing down), then click on the size of photo that you want. Clicking on the size link will open the photo in another tab. You can copy the address bar URL of the photo from the address bar and paste that into the "photo" link in the DoA message area.

I can make a tutorial for this but it will take a little time.

 

Welp, Photobucket has completely lost my business now. Time to delete everything off of my account and then close it down.

 

Oh wow $400! Too expensive for me for pix. I'll need to make a Flickr account.

 

Even without charging $400, I've been having difficulties even accessing PB for the past year or so! There are ads crawling all over it and it is SO SLOW. I tried to complain to PB last year and they were all "Oh, I don't know what you're experiencing! It shouldn't be that way!" --but it just got worse from there. They have the ugliest ads, also! I can't even stand looking at them!!!

I have a paid account, so my photos are still showing up, even though I can't really use PB any more, because of the problems above. I think they said they will block even the paid accounts eventually...

I've been trying to fix the links on some things when I can, since I still can see what is showing up... But it's a LOT of work to replace 13 years of posted photos!

 

I closed my account a few weeks ago but before I did they would occasionally log me off and then it was a battle with the ads to log back on. You should at least cancel your recurring payment in Paypal. That will also tell you how long you account will work.