All my picture links are broken. All those threads with my pics in them are now pretty much useless because of Photobucket. They suck.

I've been using a free Photobucket account for years. All these years, I've uploaded pics to their site and then linked to them from other places (like this forum).

Well, guess what... They just made a changed their policy and removed the ability to link to pics from other locations. They call it "3rd party hosting", and you can no longer do it from a free account. In order to have that ability, you must upgrade to a higher level pay account. In fact, in order to have the ability to do "3rd party hosting", you have to upgrade to their "Plus 500" level account.

Now get this.... The cost for the pay account that will allow this linking is.......  $400 dollars per year!!!

So, I'm really sorry, but my pics are gone. If anyone has a specific thread that they're looking at and want the pics, I'll see what I can do about hosting them somewhere else, but I have so many that there's no way I can wholesale move everything at once. Sorry...

I have mixed feelings about the whole thing.  I've never liked the Photobucket links because they're usually slow to load.  And sometimes people let their accounts lapse or go dead and the links disappear anyway.  I've always thought it made sense to load them on to the site that you post on.  No offense to all y'all Photobucketeers.

The internet is kind of like a big old tree.  Branches will die and fall off and eventually the whole thing is going to fall over.  Paper books will become like gold.

They will let this fester for a week or two then roll out a $50 a year plan that everyone will jump on and think is a steal. Reverse psych.

If they would have offered that first everyone would have still freaked out and complained. Now they will jump on the $50 plan.

 

I got on the www back in '95. Never even thought about photobucket?  What's the draw? I've got cdrs with all my old pics and now dvdrs. I don't get it but I'm a dip stick. Is it similar to the "cloud"? 

Well the big draw for me was a place to host my photos without a money outlay and make them available to youze guys.

In other words, they would host my pics, and in return, I would look at all their ads as payment for the service.

I'm not sure how "short sighted" their management is. Looking at it from their point of view, I'm a waste of space. Sure I look at their ads, and I've even clicked on a couple of their vendors ad links to suppliers, but they surely can't get a lot of real money out of my existence. From their perspective, I'm sure they believe people like me are not bringing in money, but are taking up space.

I suspect if they can weather the current shite-storm of bad press and hostile attitudes, they will be in a better financial position in a year or so.

I can hope that doesn't happen and they change their mind and go back to how it was three weeks ago, but I doubt it.

The problem for me here is I can't edit any of my posts. On HybridZ I was able to go back and update all of my posts. It kind of sucks because I have a couple of "how to" posts here that I would like to update. 

1 hour ago, Derek said:

The problem for me here is I can't edit any of my posts. On HybridZ I was able to go back and update all of my posts. It kind of sucks because I have a couple of "how to" posts here that I would like to update. 

Mike LOVES these kinds of problems.  @Mike

Derek, I feel your pain. Here's to hoping PB changes their mind and re-allows 3rd party posting.

Not likely, but I guess it could happen!

It's a shame that Photobucket went with this type of business model. I just hope that they change their mind about it after a while.

I think the longer it goes without them changing back, the less likely it is that they ever will. Honestly, I think if they were going back, it would have happened by now.

I wonder if they are publically traded, and what the last two months of stock value look like...

16 hours ago, Captain Obvious said:

I think the longer it goes without them changing back, the less likely it is that they ever will. Honestly, I think if they were going back, it would have happened by now.

I wonder if they are publically traded, and what the last two months of stock value look like...

I just recently checked their Twitter page and by the looks of it, the insurmountable negative feedback says it all. Perhaps we may give them a few months before the boat sinks as a whole.