Photobucket's new policy

1000w

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Anyone else get the start paying for 3rd party hosting email from Photobucket?
From now on if you want to host photos on ES, for example, using Photobucket it will cost $39.99 (in Australia) per month.
They tell me that my photos will still be available and safe but the 3rd party hosting option on my account will be disabled unless I pay.
Which I'm not going to do, so I guess my 9 years of posts here on ES will soon have no photos.
A bit annoying.
 
I read some about that last week and just shook my head. I understand needing to make money , but they should have thought the whole plan out a bit better.

Holding peoples photos that they previously allowed for free gives them a lot of bad thought coming their way.

Maybe it's a last ditch effort to stay afloat. Guess we will know in time. I expect them not to last if they do not reverse their policy.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/4/15919224/photobucket-broken-images-amazon-ebay-etsy-paid-update

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/big-lesson-learned-photobuckets-ransom-images-debacle-191026772.html
 
Been a while since I've used Photobucket. I've never understood how they make ANY money. I don't know this policy will hurt them, I just don't know that it'll save them, either.
 
Their income was from ads tho im not sure how or where they were injected. I never really used them much myself , but just looking at older posts today I seen pics from there no longer showing up.
 
1000w said:
From now on if you want to host photos on ES, for example, using Photobucket it will cost $39.99 (in Australia) per month.
...
Which I'm not going to do, so I guess my 9 years of posts here on ES will soon have no photos.
A bit annoying.
ohzee said:
...but just looking at older posts today I seen pics from there no longer showing up.
Excellent examples of why photos should be uploaded to ES instead of linked from another site - it only takes a few seconds to upload.

We've had many problems in the past with photo accounts being closed or photos deleted/reorganized in 3rd party photo sites -- the photos just disappear from the corresponding ES posts.

If you went through the trouble to post in the first place, ensure your posts remain meaningful for years to come.
Upload, don't link.
 
Great advice and I would have done this if I had known.
When I first joined ES someone recommended Photobucket and I thought linking was the only way to post photos.
 
1000w said:
Great advice and I would have done this if I had known.
When I first joined ES someone recommended Photobucket and I thought linking was the only way to post photos.
I might suggest that you use the 'QUOTE' button to do 'posting research'.

When you see a feature that you would like to use but don't know how, just quote the example post and eyeball the text. Figuring out "How it was done" is generally a short step when you can see "What was done"....

So - as a 'research exercise', here's an example of a hot-linked photo and an example (from your signature) of how to hide the URL but display descriptive text - both gimmicks use the built-in post edit buttons in perhaps non-obvious ways:

smallPic.png
Your builds:
Cyclone 1000w Cruiser
Giant NRS/Mac hub/48v Headway now A123 build
Long wheel base front box cargo bike
Basman style cruiser with Mac and A123 20ah


Anyhow - back to the business of uploading photos - here's one of your photos uploaded as an attachment and placed inline two different ways:

bigPic.jpg

bigPic2.jpg

As you can see, the filesize of the image determines how ES will display it. So - you may want to re-encode images so the size remains the same but the byte size of the image is smaller (less than 256kb).

An easy means to resize your photos to meet the size requirements above is to download (free) Irfanview + RIOT plugin and configure it to save the image as a jpg at 250kb. Once configured you need only drag and drop a too-big photo onto the Irfanview desktop icon and press 'SaveAs' then 'Save'. Done.

Here's the basic IrfanView 'ES resizer' setup:


  • (Common browser click behavior: hold <Shift> for new window, hold <Ctrl> for new tab)

So - three things:
  1. 'QUOTE' button for research,
  2. 'Upload Attachment' / 'Place inline' to upload, and
  3. optionally 'IrfanView' to resize.
An no more PhotoBucket, please... :)
 
Note that some of those sites don't actually have a link URL that directly accesses the image--they instead run scripts that stick the image into the page, so not all browsers will display them correctly or at all, and if you are running script blocking (like adblockers, etc), they also may not show up.

Directly attaching the image to the post *does* work when those other sites don't.

Plus the images should get backed up with the rest of the forum, which won't happen with anything linked from off-site. (resulting in their loss when the other site goes away or changes, and can often make the entire post or thread completely useless, if the information that was in the images is no longer available).


There is also a stickied thread at the top of every forum called Adding Pictures, with a lot of info in it. I wish that someone would go thru all the new threads about that and merge or copy them in there, so all the info in those would also be there for people to find and use. ;)
 
teklektik said:
An no more PhotoBucket,

Do you have to rub it in? 1000w Matt was pointing out why not to use photo hosting,
on my mac I open photo in preview and then select adjust size then select custom then choose your size, 800x600 works well or 1024x768 then save as...
 

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