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Photobucket replacement


OoPEZoO

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Sooooo....if you haven't noticed, photobucket has changed their policy on free 3rd party picture hosting. The only way around it seems to be a monthly subscription fee. Not a chance.....especially from photobucket as they have already broken every single link to every pic I have post online in the last ~10 years. Thats frustrating to say the least, as most of the pics were posted in an attempt to diagnose problems or document a procedure. I understand if they want to start a subscription service from here on out, but to break the links to everything previously posted is just wrong. I will be pulling everything from my account there and never using their services for anything again.

 

So who has a good recommendation for a replacement? The only thing I ever hosted was for message board usage between the varies boards I frequent. Free is good, but would consider a subscription if its worth the price of admission.

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Keith,

 

Smugmug is subscription, but is run by the family that owns ADVrider. https://www.smugmug.com/plans

 

Flickr (what I use) is free and is owned by Yahoo. A little uncertainty in the long term because of the change of ownership by Verizon.

 

Google is free, but is a pain to use.

 

Brian

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Google is free, but is a pain to use.

 

Yup, can't recommend Google. It was good when it was still Picasa. They have made it difficult (on purpose I think) to use it as a hosting site. Doable, as I still suffer through because I've got a ton a photos from the former.

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Dennis Andress

SmugMug. Yeah they want money, but they've never broken a link or done anything else stupid.

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Thats the really frustrating part....as I have tons of photos loaded in to photobucket. It was always pretty easy to use, even on the go using a mobile device. None of what I have on there are hi res pics. Its not like I'm going to lose access to priceless family pics or anything. They are all compressed, cropped, dumbed down versions used only for message board posting. I could delete them all today and it really wouldn't effect anything other than I need to find another service (on principle), and that it breaks the links to every picture I've ever posted online.

 

What a crock.

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SmugMug. Yeah they want money, but they've never broken a link or done anything else stupid.

 

I'm sure they are enjoying all of the new business due to how bad photobucket PO'd their users.

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I'm sure they are enjoying all of the new business due to how bad photobucket PO'd their users.

 

That's my takeaway as well. Right now, I can't get enough server resources to even delete all my pictures there on Photobucket. I'm sure they're swamped with people doing exactly the same thing... :computer:

 

 

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Lone_RT_rider
SmugMug. Yeah they want money, but they've never broken a link or done anything else stupid.

 

Ditto... my pics from 2003 Torrey still link and work perfectly. Nuff said.

 

Shawn%20and%20Wurty.jpg

Edited by Lone_RT_rider
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How well do flickr and Smugmug work on mobile devices? Do they have their own apps and easy copy/paste functions for linking to the pics?

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Lone_RT_rider
How well do flickr and Smugmug work on mobile devices? Do they have their own apps and easy copy/paste functions for linking to the pics?

 

They have an app and I have used it a couple of times, but I am far from a power user. I have been pretty happy with the limited experiences I have had.

 

Shawn

Edited by Lone_RT_rider
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szurszewski
How well do flickr and Smugmug work on mobile devices? Do they have their own apps and easy copy/paste functions for linking to the pics?

 

No experience with smugmug, but my I do use Flickr to host pics for THIS forum (really, that's it!) and I have not been able to figure out how to get a usable link via there mobile app. From the normal browser interface it's no problem.

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I think I might switch to SmugMug. Seems it might be set up to be there a while. I don't mind $3.99 per month, I was paying $2.99 per month for Photobucket. How can Photobucket justify $39.99 per month when competitors are 1/10 that amount?

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I'm in the same boat. My annual fee is coming up and I think it said I was grandfathered til the end of 2018. I assume that means my pics will then disappear from this site and ADV. Bummer.

 

I did not use Smugmug when I first starting linking pics as I was confused by their setup and in picking what my site would look like. I didn't care. All I wanted was a spot to put pics in a simple file. Guess I will have to now go look and see if I am still confused, or at least anymore than I normally am. :dopeslap:

 

Ok, I just started a Smugmug trial 14 day account. Uploaded one pic. Hit the sharing button and thought I copied a link. Went here and when I try to paste link, nothing there saved. I knew it wouldn't be easy. :P

 

Well, maybe I found out what was wrong. I needed to save it in BBCode, whatever the heck that is. Who knew? :)

 

Imogene%20Pass%20a%20%28Custom%29-M.jpg

 

Imogene 1995

Edited by KTM Doug
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Google is free, but is a pain to use.

 

Yup, can't recommend Google. It was good when it was still Picasa. They have made it difficult (on purpose I think) to use it as a hosting site. Doable, as I still suffer through because I've got a ton a photos from the former.

Amen to that. I'm still upset with Google for killing Picasa, and expecting people to use Google Photos, which is next to useless for organizing and less than useless for linking — Google Photos image links won't even work for Google's own product forums.

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Ok, I just started a Smugmug trial 14 day account. Uploaded one pic. Hit the sharing button and thought I copied a link. Went here and when I try to paste link, nothing there saved. I knew it wouldn't be easy. :P

 

Well, maybe I found out what was wrong. I needed to save it in BBCode, whatever the heck that is. Who knew? :)

 

 

BBCode (bulletin board code) is just the language used by this forum software.

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What a PITA. I only use my Photobucket account when I am on the road because of the convenience of uploading pictures via the Android app. Now I have a bunch of broken links to my photos in a few threads.

 

Most of my photos are "hosted" on my domain, but ftp programs sometimes don't play nice with wifi networks in remote locations.

 

Is there a specific moderator to email to update the links?

 

Mike Cassidy

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Yup.....what a PITA. Its one thing to switch to a subscription model, its a whole different level of asshattery that they broke everyones existing links with zero warning and replaced it with a $400/yr option as the only way to keep the links alive.

 

I can't tell you how many things I've seen in the last 2 weeks where I researched something online only to find dead picture links due to this. It is effecting a LOT, especially message forums like this that relied on 3rd party pic hosting for writing tutorials and how to's.

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Shiny Side Up

Maybe enough folks will get P.O.'d and send P-Bucket into bankruptcy... No users = No advertisers.

I can only hope.

 

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Dave McReynolds

An Airstream site I belong to allows posting of photos directly from your own computer, and an archery site I belong to is changing over to that after the Photobucket disaster. I'm not a techie, but that seems a preferable way to do things.

 

As an aside, it seems totally predictable to me that Photobucket would become about as popular as thalidomide after doing this, and it seems incredible to me that nobody over there could see it coming. Incredible to the point that I wonder if there could be some hidden agenda?

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szurszewski

ADV allows direct attachment of files to posts, though they do limit it to four per post. Of course that means they need to store those files somewhere which costs money, but it makes posting there SO much easier - especially doing ride reports on the road.

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Dave McReynolds
ADV allows direct attachment of files to posts, though they do limit it to four per post. Of course that means they need to store those files somewhere which costs money, but it makes posting there SO much easier - especially doing ride reports on the road.

 

A photo I attached directly from my iPad to this page on the Airstream Forum, "Lupe and friend" indicates that it is taking up 321 bytes. I think they must have a way of attaching photos without moving the whole file to their website.

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szurszewski
ADV allows direct attachment of files to posts, though they do limit it to four per post. Of course that means they need to store those files somewhere which costs money, but it makes posting there SO much easier - especially doing ride reports on the road.

 

A photo I attached directly from my iPad to this page on the Airstream Forum, "Lupe and friend" indicates that it is taking up 321 bytes. I think they must have a way of attaching photos without moving the whole file to their website.

 

If you look at the source code/html for the page, that image is living on their server/space. It's 321kb (kilobytes - not just bytes) which is a reasonable file size for an image of that size and web quality. I'd imagine they reduce the file size - if it's large - automatically to save space; it looks like most/all the images in that thread appear around the same dimension and file size.

 

I had forgotten, but was recently reminded, that ADV only allows logged in members to view full size pics - "guests" just get to see the thumbnails of hosted images.

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This is going to be a big problem for forums. This one included. This one is privately owned. But many if not most popular forums are now commercial. This, in my mind, puts them in the position of having to start hosting pictures. Which is probably the way it should be for a commercial site.

I didn't know ADV allowed pictures uploaded. But I don't do much over there anyway. The couple sites I used in the past that did allow that were VERY difficult to use.

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PBase in another option. Yes it is pay to use but my brother and I have been very happy with it for years. Flickr is used by MANY of the forum users at Photography on the Net, (and a good portion of them are or could be pros) but I don't know if it's a pay or free site. If I didn't already have hundreds of pics already at PBase I would use them.

 

www.pbase.com/xygoat

 

Click on the John folders to see my pics.

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szurszewski
This is going to be a big problem for forums. This one included. This one is privately owned. But many if not most popular forums are now commercial. This, in my mind, puts them in the position of having to start hosting pictures. Which is probably the way it should be for a commercial site.

I didn't know ADV allowed pictures uploaded. But I don't do much over there anyway. The couple sites I used in the past that did allow that were VERY difficult to use.

 

ADV is super simple - drag and drop on your desktop or tap add photo on your phone and it goes right to your camera roll for selection.

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I use imgur.com for my free image hosting now, since leaving Flickr due to all the problems Yahoo has had with security.

Edited by DJ_Fission
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