[Archive] Photobucket TOS Woes & Third party image hosting

Nicodemus:

Greetings CDO members and visitors.  Five days ago Photobucket changed their terms of service and it has been causing havoc and disarray across a great many forums, CDO among them!

Photobucket has been a popular image hosting service allowing members to sign on for free and upload images which they can then share a link to online.  Photobucket started out almost exclusively as a 3rd party image hosting service - meaning you can link to images stored on their servers for free using tags.

In what seems like a naked money grab due to the fact that their business model of free hosting and the hope that ad revenue comes washing in hasn’t been working out they way they hoped, they have changed their Terms of Service, such that 3rd party hosting is no longer allowed for any of the free accounts. Moreover, 3rd party hosting is not allowed for the low cost or mid-range accounts. For anyone using Photobucket to store images that wishes to continue to link via embedding on websites and forums they will have to upgrade their account to the top-tier Plus500 plan (which is ~$40USD /month) in order to unlock 3rd party hosting of their images.

This is a major blow to blogs and forums across the 'net right now and is reminiscent of the days when Angelfire and Geocities were going down in flames.  

Unless Photobucket makes an abrupt course correction the forum here is going to look pretty grim for the next while until members can sort out new arrangements for image hosting. This will also have a significant impact on the majority of older content here on CDO as well.  Hang in there with us while we all attempt to navigate this rather unanticipated curve ball.

~N

P.S.Don’t forget you can attach images to posts, but there is a size allocation limit for users here at present in order to keep the total footprint of CDO manageable.

1 Like

TheHoodedMan:

Greetings CDO members and visitors.  Five days ago Photobucket changed their terms of service and it has been causing havoc and disarray across a great many forums, CDO among them!

Photobucket has been a popular image hosting service allowing members to sign on for free and upload images which they can then share a link to online.  Photobucket started out almost exclusively as a 3rd party image hosting service - meaning you can link to images stored on their servers for free using tags.

In what seems like a naked money grab due to the fact that their business model of free hosting and the hope that ad revenue comes washing in hasn't been working out they way they hoped, they have changed their Terms of Service, such that 3rd party hosting is no longer allowed for any of the free accounts. Moreover, 3rd party hosting is not allowed for the low cost or mid-range accounts. For anyone using Photobucket to store images that wishes to continue to link via embedding on websites and forums they will have to upgrade their account to the top-tier Plus500 plan (which is ~$40USD /month) in order to unlock 3rd party hosting of their images.

This is a major blow to blogs and forums across the 'net right now and is reminiscent of the days when Angelfire and Geocities were going down in flames.  

Unless Photobucket makes an abrupt course correction the forum here is going to look pretty grim for the next while until members can sort out new arrangements for image hosting. This will also have a significant impact on the majority of older content here on CDO as well.  Hang in there with us while we all attempt to navigate this rather unanticipated curve ball.

~N

P.S.Don't forget you can attach images to posts, but there is a size allocation limit for users here at present in order to keep the total footprint of CDO manageable.

Nicodemus
Thanks for the information. Do you know when photobucket will effectively execute this change? My miniature pics are hosted nearly exclusively on photobucket and atm everything looks still normal.

Nicodemus:

Thanks for the information. Do you know when photobucket will effectively execute this change? My miniature pics are hosted nearly exclusively on photobucket and atm everything looks still normal.

TheHoodedMan
Looks like it's happening to most already. If you look through our army blogs here most have the following shown:


For now you can click on the upgrade/hot linking notification and it'll take you to the image, but the TOS seems to state that such functionality will be going away too.

What we need is someone with some web savvy skills to write a little script to crawl through the site and look for any img tags with photobucket.com in the URL, follow the link, save the image from Photobucket and store it on a friendly server, then replace all instances of the original URL with a URL to the new image location. This would immediately recover most of our older army blog content without requiring members to scan through many pages of posts to fix images one by one.

~N

Dînadan:

Anyone know of any alternate image hosting sites?

Just experimented with something I’ve uploaded to DeviantArt, but can’t get the image to show here (using the coding in their ‘share’ options just ends up with a blank box on here) so I don’t think that’s a viable option (in the long run at least, in the short term people could upload to there and include links in their posts on here to the DA page; links aren’t as attractive as actual pics, but at least they’ll be viewable).

Admiral:

I use Imgur nowadays. It’s free and quite easy to use, plus it has all the edit options that Photobucket had. Photobucket has had performance problems for a long time, and now this…!

Detestable. This undermines continuity of sites right across the web. Shameful conduct!

Personally, I’d have been fine to pay a one-time payment to expand my account space, but a monthly fee? Out of this world. And now this third party hosting streak. :mask

Carcearion:

This is a disaster!

So much in the forum achieves has already been lost! Most of what could be dug up was from photobucket!

Those bastards, I’ve used them for over a decade!!!

1 Like

TheHoodedMan:

ok, thank you.

I dont think photobucket will have a better situation from this procedure. <br>Ill sure not pay 40$ or so for hosting the pics but I`ll keep my account for the case photobuckets management change their minds.

Imgur is a possibility but maybe there are others as well.

Enjoysrandom:

So to get an image from photo bucket don’t use there links? Can you just right click the image and go “copy image address” and use the (img) (/img)? Thats with the

Enjoysrandom:

Ok little update you can link pictures from Google drive its just a bit more fiddly. If you open up the image you want to link and hold ctrl and then right  click you can copy the image address and then use the [ img ] [ /img] code to display it! I will delete my photobucket account now!

Here is a picture from my google drive of my palanquin for Gorgoth the Cruel

Admiral:

[align=center][/align]

[align=center]We risk an almost complete breakdown of continuity in images[/align]

With the recent Photobucket trouble we’ll have to ask ourselves what legends of old should be targeted for photo backup? This is a disaster to continuity and it seems we have scarce time to act before the old photos go completely unavailable. As of now, it is possible to right-click pictures under lockdown, choose view image in new tab and copy it from there.

Remember that Imageshack has already robbed us of archive material, and the Photobucket strike is much larger in scope. We risk losing almost everything old which new members have stumbled upon through the years, taking inspiration from old masters.

I know I’ll not have much time to contribute with in the coming weeks. I must fix some Golden Hat entries today and maybe tomorrow, but I could help some after that, within limitations. If many of us could help some, it would add up. This is not drudgery which anyone wish to do during the summer, but it is now or never, unless Photobucket come to their senses and change direction completely.

[align=center]Volunteers?[/align]

Can we please gather links to the logs and work of inactive members which we’d particularly like to see saved from the looming disaster? Then we could chew through the threads one at a time and avoid redundant double-work by advancing which thread/member we each pick. An all-out manual trawl of the whole log section could maybe be possible, but it would be true slave labour. Realistically, we should target worthy pictures in particular.

If we can establish a link list, then some volunteers could possibly wade through it to save backup copies on their own computer, to be transferred to some free and currently stable photohosting site such as Imgur. From there, we could re-upload some stuff in big chunks with lots of photos.

Please remember that artwork should be saved along with miniature photos.

See here for the salvage thread.

Pyro Stick:

This is a complete joke. Beginning of the end for Photobucket i think. I havent had any email from them or anything but it looks like my blog is fine for now. Im not going to pay so i guess its only a matter of time before all my links are dead. I never liked their interface so as soon as my links are killed ill be deleting my photobucket account and looking for somewhere else. They probably thought that if they threatened to affect thousands of websites, forums, blogs and ebay auctions then everyone would pay but all those users are going to drop them as soon as they can find somewhere else to upload their photos. Time to download all my albums. Probably going to be half a gigabyte or something which will take me ages -_- I hope there will be such a backlash (their facebook is already a mess) that they will reverse the decision but if not i guess ill have to start moving everything over to imgur.

Grimbold Blackhammer:

This is disappointing but they served us well for years so I understand their need to pay bills (though I expect this will end badly for them).

Admins - what is the storage capacity of the website? Is it feasible to upgrade it to be able to store our photos here or is the $$$ amount just too much?

Nicodemus:

Admins - what is the storage capacity of the website?  Is it feasible to upgrade it to be able to store our photos here or is the $$$ amount just too much?

Grimbold Blackhammer
There is some space, but I don't think we've got anywhere enough to absorb the large amount of storage that would be needed to properly address the issue. The entire CDO account takes up ~4GB, although there's a few things of Xander's that aren't CDO-related, which is fine as he pays for it ;) But on a yearly basis CDO itself doesn't grow that much as a lot of what is added is text and then a few images for contests every couple of months.

In terms of addressing this - in my case I've got 1,917 images on Photobucket. I'm planning to start with my own army blog and just start at page 1 and save images in order: p1img1.jpg, p1img2.jpg, etc. Once I figure out where I want to store this stuff it'll just be a matter of updating the links. We have a reserved amount of web storage with our own home internet account and we're not planning to move for the foreseeable future. I think a big issue though is that I've got about 1.2 GB of images there, and I don't think I've got that much space with our service provider x.x

~N

Zanko:

I will save all my pics (more than 1.000) on my Laptop and in case I could restore my blog … :expressionless:

Not very funny! :~

                        :hashut

Will Liam:

Can we put the pics on to different facebook pages for storage or will that not work? Im no good with computer stuff so I will not be offended if its a dumb idea :slight_smile:

RexHavoc:

Can we put the pics on to different facebook pages for storage or will that not work?  Im no good with computer stuff so I will not be offended if its a dumb idea :)

Will Liam
You would be better off sticking with either Imgur or with google drive.

Facebook compresses photos something chronic now, and they can look pretty rubbish when viewed- especially when not on a mobile screen.

Great for dodgy drinking pics, but not so great for looking at intricate details of models!

Plus the security settings on facebook are a hassle. Quite often photos will be blocked for certain users, which will not allow them to view them at all. Its fine if you can keep you links up to date, but facebook has a habit of changing the settings regularly that can mess up older links. People with out facebook may not see anything at all.

Goggledrive might be a bit more of a hassle, but even if you fill one drive up, its not to hard to set up another (free!) account! (I have about 4 google drive accounts now, mostly because they were dished out at college but its super handy, as I have a fair bit of free storage now!

Imgur is good as there is already quite a number of miniature related tags, as well as several subreddits that use it for showing there work.

There is also instagram & flickr.

So no, facebook is not a dumb idea, but it would only work as a temp fix, it would become an annoyance after the first settings update they put out!

Carcearion:

It looks like people who used the direct image link are’nt subject to this restriction (which is why some of us like myself and Pyro Stick appear uneffected).

Regardless I’ll be voting with my feet, I am tied up this weekend, but as of next weekend if this policy inst changed I’ll be migrating all my images to Imgur.

clam:

Don’t know what to say … :frowning:

First, I though it was virus like Wannacry - but this is real…! Photobucket simply killed their own business … that’s a strange move … :~

Pappa Midnight:

Oh well, only EVERY image I have ever uploaded…

Good job I keep back ups. What a bunch of complete ****s!

I really hope people vote with their feet.

PM

Nicodemus:

We’re working toward a very quick fix for some of the Photobucket content.

I think the most helpful thing members could do at present would be to backup their CDO content from Photobucket by using the Download link in their Photobucket account.

We think we can backup most member’s Photobucket images right here on CDO (this is a one time thing and we won’t be able to do this in perpetuity).

After talking with Xander I think we have a way to quickly redirect all links, but we need those backup files from Photobucket so that we have files with the same filenames.

More updates as they come available.

~N