Photobucket 3rd party hosting?

So my pictures have died on Photobucket. The picture they threw up says something about upgrading for third party hosting. Is that what I'm doing on GRM? Or is it because other commercial sites have grabbed my pictures and are using them without hosting themselves? I don't really want to pay $40 a month for this but I don't want all of my pictures to die either.

Crap, really? That was the whole reason I started using Photobucket. Google stopped allowing remote linking. Can someone verify if they can still see the pics in my build thread?

Anything you trust to a free service you get what you pay for.....

Secondly if you read the fine print on the agreement once posted to photobucket your photos belong to them as well.

Not to mention the folks that dont care about ownership and will slurp whatever they want.

Get your own web hosting account and host the pics yourself.

I can still see yours. That gives me hope that it's just some sort of bandwidth thing. I either need to spend money or people need to stop looking at my stuff?

Probably Photobucket trying to sucker you into paying for "membership"

Get a domain name (register it yourself joker.com dirt cheap).

Get a hosting account (I use Pair.com) very reasonable and have backups, I've never seen down time.

I had been a paying member, but at the lowest tier, and things had been ok through the great internet blowup of the R63 thread. What I worried about is that someone else is using my pictures (I just post direct links) in such as way that it's considered third party hosting and that's why I got dinged. I don't know enough to know what I don't know.

I pay about $30 a year for Photobucket due to bandwidth requirements. The Jet Boat build pushed me over the edge and I have been ever sice. I have a Plus20 account and it has unlimited bandwidth.

Maz, I saw that PB was hassling you, and that was my first thought. Too famous. I'm sure you just pegged the views with all your threads, and all the people watching. The secret is out. Hopefully you can get it sorted without spending too much dough.

I pay about 39 bucks a year, and currently am just under 9% usage, but have nowhere near the number of pictures of even one of your threads. They recently "updated" my payment methods, and I started to get P.O.'d, but once I found out it was the same 3ish bucks a month I've been paying for a year or so, I calmed down. Best wishes. I love all the threads.

I literally abandoned all of the pictures I have on photobucket because I don't possess the patience to deal with how terrible their site became to use 3 years ago. Currently using Imgur and wondering what happened to that 225 image cap they hit me with a while back.

It's so involved as to be prohibitive, but you can link google photos; you just have to look them up through Google drive, note the ID, and create your own link... (Seriously. About both the ability and how stupid the process is; Gah, now I can't find the how-to, but really, you don't want to do that...)

I'm trying to decide right now about which service to move to. I think I've got an imageshack account somewhere. Flickr's still workable, and I actually kinda like that you can embed one photo at a choice of smaller sizes and wrap it in a link to the original if you want to work that way. I have my own domain and hosting, too, but it actually seems like a little bit of a pain to deal with FTPing and looking up file paths. Perhaps I should set up a local directory that gets mirrored to my site so I can refer to the local path and filenames to make links...

Which is semi-related to the OP: image hosting seems to mostly suck. The free stuff is limited and dodgy, and the paid stuff is at least overpriced. Between imageshack, smugmug, flickr, google, photobucket, imgur... Seems like among the GRM crowd we ought to have a best or least-worst option agreed on...

The big problem is that I have around 1000 photos that are linked in my various threads. Even if I could migrate the photos with the names intact, making everything work again would be a full time job for a week.

Just got the notice that all my pics linked from PB are held hostage till I fork up $399/ year for third party hosting. There goes my build thread.

Is there a work around this? Is there a way to transfer all my PB pics to another hosting site en masse? Then I could tell PB to kiss my berkeleying ass.

I got hit with this Friday as well.

I can still access all my stuff via the phone app and website.

I was hoping it was just a monthly limit thing and waiting to see if it resets first of the month

I'm sure Flickr will start charging soon, at which point I will just stop hosting pictures.

It occurs to me that I have a lot of hosting space with the domain I bought just for the email address. Looks like it is a pretty easy setup but it would take months to go back and update the links in all my build threads across various forums.

Ive been paying for years just so im not that guy with all the broken pictures. I want people to be able to use the info ive thrown out there.

Have we figured out why they are doing this?

Dusterbd13 wrote: Have we figured out why they are doing this?

It might have to do with the popularity of your thread and photos, so they get viewed a lot. So you hit their bandwidth limit (whatever that may be). There is probably some threshold where if you go past it they consider your usage as more "commercial"?

I've been using Flickr. Plus you can also link Facebook photos. (I know, I know, Facebook sucks, whatever.)

Photobucket ransomed all my forum pics last week, too. Someone mentioned Amazon Prime includes hosting, I'll look into that. Pretty glad I don't have a thousand like you, Mazdeuce. That would be a challenge.

I have something like 3k linked.....

Happened to me this week too. Berk.

Seems like they've changed a policy, since everyone is getting hit with it at once. I like imgur, personally.

EDIT

It's not just you guys No idea what this blog is, but apparently she has a handle on the situation

Photobucket seems to have perhaps overstepped the tolerance of its users this time.

FWIW I use flickr, IIRC its 1TB of free hosting space. No bandwidth limit as far as I can see.

I recently started to pay photobucket for their services. What was sad is that it took me forever to sign in once I went to paid services due to all the damn popups the free services sends you.

now that it is paid for, it's like the old photobucket it used to be