VCCA Home Forums GENERAL DISCUSSION General Discussions Photobucket cash grab....

I have literally spent the last 10 years singing the praises of using Photobucket to host photos on our site. This week, corporate greed as taken over this company as well. By removing 3rd party sharing of photos from their bottom two levels of Photobucket membership, they have made it $400 USD a year to use their site for the purpose we need. Literally every journal, thread, and picture I've shared on this forum as well as a few others is now trash. I'm so disappointed that all the hard work of journalling for you guys is now gone up in smoke due to pure corporate greed.

So sorry to hear that. I really enjoyed your postings.

Dick

Photobucket's new policy is outrageous!

I can understand Photobucket not wanting to give away the store, but what they are doing is extortion.

AND, now that vcca.org is undergoing a major upgrade makes the timing doubly annoying and inconvenient to have the old links break.

Grrrr. Dean

An Ad blocker can help make it tolerable. I use AdBlock Plus with FireFox and have managed to keep most of the BS at bay. I've read on other forums that using the privacy window that most browsers have can help as well.

I've never been a fan of hosting sites for exactly this reason - it's too easy to extort you and it's ultimately only temporary and your photos, links, etc will eventually be gone.

A couple years back I literally read every single post in several of our forums going back about 15 years to the beginning of this version of chat. Even at that time about 80% of the images were gone since people remove them from their hosting sites so the posts were essentially useless as the information was gone. It was really annoying when interested in a topic.

A site like this where it's information and data that is being accumulated for long term preservation, the photos really need to be hosted within the site itself so there is always control.

Hmmm. It doesn't look like Photobucket has pulled the plug yet. Here's one post of mine that has the picture in Photobucket that still works: https://vccachat.org/ubbthreads.php/topics/388659/Re:_1925_Superior_K_touring#Post388663

Dean

I think you're on to something Dean. I re-read the OP and it seems Brewster is saying that photo sharing isn't allowed any longer for free users. If I read that correctly, that isn't the case and something else must be afoot. What exactly is happening Brewster?

Tiny, It seems Photobucket has affected your Avatar?

By golly, looks like it may have. Time to investigate.

It has affected our avatars. The only joy I get out of this whole process is knowing that a bunch of us are advertising how greedy and manipulative their company is through showing that message everywhere we post...

Not only is third party photosharing unavailable for free users... but also for the two plans above that. For $20 or $30 bucks a year I would consider biting the bullet, and signing up. For $400 USD, no way! That's almost $600 here in real money! It irks me that instead of Grandfathering this plan in, and keeping links to existing photos, they have decided to hold members hostage and demand payment if they wish to keep all of their hard work posted.

Looks like it's time to move on. So far it seems to be just the avatar. I'll be investigating options. Looks like all my links will be dead soon. Funeral anyone??

Just tried Postimage.org with this photo. No sign up necessary or cost. Seems easy enough to use.

DanR

Dan, you need to read their FAQ's. They charge $10 to remove an image and they don't like the type of post you just made. They want it done as a link.

Hi Tiny,

The $10 fee appears to be for editing an image already uploaded while still preserving the URL. As for the method of linking, they do have the one I used shown as an option. I read the FAQ for this as being, if you heavily use the site without the embedded links back to their site, they may have issues with your methodology.
As I don't display many pics, this site seems ok for my type of use (but then again, so did Photobucket).

Happy Motoring,

DanR

Problem with linking at all to an image on another site is that eventually the posting on this site will no longer be useful when the image is removed or link is broken. Images really need to be hosted here where we have full control.

Here's a link to a site previewing 12 hosting sites.

Hosting Sites

I don't know what others will use but the above mentioned PostImage seems to be a pretty good alternative to Photobucket.

Photobucket is in business to make money but I don't understand how they can go from $0 to $400 for 3rd party hosting and not even grandfather in the photos already linked. Sometimes I copied photos directly from my camera to Photobucket without copying to my computer, and then I deleted them from my camera. I discovered I cannot download those photos to my computer now without signing up for the $400 plan.

I killed my PB account. I'll either go with a pay account since all free hosting sites have issues of some kind of stop linking images all together and depend on email if I want to share. A friend has recommended Pbase which he uses and loves.

After years of working with IT customers I've never seen a terribly good reason to ever use a hosting site. They are always clumsy and I cringe when a link takes me to one as I'm usually pummeled with ads and popups.

Besides the current Photobucket issue of pictures being held captive, I'm really not comfortable with my pictures, ect being "held" by someone else. Who knows what they could be used for. I've seen news stories where people's face photos were used for advertising in other countries.

I'd never trust anything but physical media such as an SD or USB stick for safe storage of pictures and even then I have multiple copies of the entire contents on multiple cards.

The most annoying part of hosting sites is the link changing or the original picture being deleted. Even before this photobucket change I bet easily half of the links to pictures in this forum were dead ends. It's disappointing as there has been a lot of useful information lost.

Tiny, you've always been pretty darn cautious online but liked the utility of Photobucket so I'm curious to see what you finally settle on for a replacement.

For the record... In the past 15 years, I've never deleted a photo that was saved in CHAT by a VCCA member. So, on my watch, you can trust that your postings were kept securely online. And, hopefully, this feature for VCCA members only, was another reason to stay connected with the club.

But as all things happen, the biggest risk occurs when there are major software upgrades. And we aren't immune to that activity. Somewhere, somehow, in the future, the VCCA will probably need to upgrade the Chat site. Then you'll be in a position to see whether the conversion successfully salvaged all of our previous postings.

I sure hope so.