Castanet

I find it difficult to understand how a company who has given something away for free it's entire life can suddenly turn into an evil extortionist ransom seeking monster who is completely screwing everyone over, I have a cheapie free proboard website with hundreds of photo's which is now totally ruined, along with a family history website and dozens of other websites with my content that are now all useless. a dozen years worth of work GONE !

https://www.facebook.com/photobucket/


http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40492668


https://petapixel.com/2017/07/01/photob ... edded-web/

I could understand if you're using there services to post your images on eBay, etc. to sell something and make a profit for yourself. You could argue, that you're using their services for commercial purposes and thats quite normal to have to pay for that. If you're making a profit using their services, they should be making a profit off of you.

Was it a wise move on their behalf? Probably not, but if they end up offering a much better, more professional service - it could work. I haven't used PB in years, theres many more free sites out there to choose from.

Just move your stuff to a different site(google, MS, imgur, self host, god forbid you PAY to use a service...).

The way they did it was very shady and irresponsible towards their users, but really, free can't be free forever...

That free site you love today will be the photobucket of tomorrow.

For the minimal cost involved these days, I don't know why more people don't just host their own stuff on a personal cloud.

The recent PhotoBucket tactic is strange. I'd quit using them a couple of years ago because the site was so infested with popups and ads, that without paying the minimum, it was unbearable to use. I think they also slowed the site down, so unless you had a paid account, it was like molasses in January. But they are not a charitable organization, and if their new plan works, good on them.

I use a few others and have some Google "My Drive" space which works really well.

I often wonder how some of the photo hosting sites make their money. For example, one really good one is Imgur. When you go to their site http://imgur.com/, you don't see any ads. Once you register and sign in, you still don't see ads. When you open an image, you will then finally see a small unobtrusive ad or two. Apparently there is a paid membership if you want to upload hi-rez images and be totally ad free. Photo linking is permitted from the free account. From what I read online, using this business model, they are highly profitable.

Old Techie wrote:For the minimal cost involved these days, I don't know why more people don't just host their own stuff on a personal cloud.

Because free is still better than low cost.

Until of course you get screwed lol

I just checked my website and discovered Photobucket have restored the broken links but they still want money

Photobucket has also been implicated as part of the VPNFilter Router malware.

This process is called "cashing out" and is very common.

Offer a service for free, build up a large fan/user base while choking out the competition, then either make it a paid service or spam the crap out of it with advertisements (or both). Facebook in it's early days was almost Ad-free. Now it's more ads than content and they also sell your data.

It's all part of the strategy. These are companies looking to make money, not philanthropists.

firefox has an extension that restores the viewability of images hosted on photobucket that were posted on forums. Just sayin!

MCB wrote:firefox has an extension that restores the viewability of images hosted on photobucket that were posted on forums. Just sayin!

Chrome too. Works great.