What do you think of Photobucket's new policy?

[cinvowell]

If you haven't noticed a lot of pictures are down that were third party through Photobucket. They've changed their policy and no longer allow that service for free. Instead, they want people to pay $399.99 a year for that service.

I think they are out of their minds. If they want to charge a small fee for the service I can see that but $400 is outrageous. I don't see how they even expect to get customers that way. Because of this I though I'd put the few pictures I had on there back on my computer but they don't allow that either. The only reason I have pictures on there at all is when I posted something on the old ISOHunt forum I was on a few years ago (the first time I posted anything personal ever). I'll be going back and simply deleting everything. If I can't use the service without paying an outrageous price I don't need the account.

What's your opinion?

 

[Bambi]

they try to make out like its super cheap as well $1 a day hahaha fuck that xD

 

[cinvowell]

I'm having this same conversation on another forum.

The first notice I got about this was Sept.11 well after they had taken everything down saying "Does this look familiar?" and showing that symbol they replaced all the pictures with like some kind of hostage message.

I'm sure photobucket knew they were in trouble long before this. If they had taken a new approach way before now they could have salvaged the situation. It looks like they never even tried to find new ways to solve the problem or introduce new ways to get revenue. One of the guys on the other forum mentioned Imgur. I looked them up and photobucket could have learned something from them. They don't just rely on the photo section of their site. They have a store with merchandise with their logo. This feels like a last ditch effort on photobucket's part to grab what they can, unfortunately I think this might be the end of their business. I don't see many people, even those with businesses, signing up for that $400 crap. Anyone who does and they close up shop, lets say 3 or 4 months from now, they're screwed all over again. You can't do that to customers and expect them to be loyal.


All those irritating pop-ups they have generate revenue and when I went to my pictures there must have been 15 - 20 of those things popping up every time I touched something or passed over something. I actually had a hard time accessing my pictures. I don't usually complain about stuff like that because I know that on the free sections of any site that's how they re-coop some of their cost and make money. I've had a couple sites that I went to quite frequently that had pop-ups unreal but since the services were free and I enjoyed going to those sites I didn't mind even if some were, lets say not family friendly. That's how they kept the site running and made money. One site is still active and the other very successful site is down due to other events unrelated to revenue.

Bottom line, it sounds like just bad business choices on their part that brought them to this end.

 

[Dionysos]

$400 is absolutely ridiculous! Plus the fact that you can't get to your images to reclaim and save them. I cannot imagine that many people will be using this service now.

As a forum we've really been hit hard by it too.

These used to be smileys:

:shesaid:

While we now upload our smileys directly into our system (and not through Photobucket, etc) there are some former admins who must have used Photobucket to host the smileys, and there doesn't seem to be a way to reverse that. With these Photobucket smileys we are now no longer able to access them to even save the smileys and re-upload them under a different code. Our admin control panel is a little awkward in the sense that it doesn't seem to let us delete smileys from our system once we add them... This means that we are now permanently left with embarrassing 3rd party hosting images instead of smileys.

I haven't thought yet about my personal images that might be saved on Photobucket. I think I should have copies on my computer anyway.

Imgur is definitely more secure and reliable (for now) and so that is what FFF staff tend to use.






EDIT - Weird.... I right-clicked two of the smileys I posted here and they seemed to come back to life after I refreshed the page... The other three are still dead though!

 

[cinvowell]

I think all of the forums are being hit hard. I know the other forum I'm on zophar.net has a lot of photos removed and there are businesses out there that use the service. Can you imagine trying to sell your product and having all the pictures disappear like this. Like I said, their holding our pictures hostage. I don't see the site staying up for long because I don't see very many people paying the ransom and that's what $400 a year feels like.

Did you guys get that strange e-mail they sent? I scrolled down toward the bottom and it gives instructions how to download. I've been trying it but I either get an error message or nothing but maybe part of the problem might be my shitty computer. If you go to your pictures, on the right hand side under actions at the bottom of that list there's "Download album". That's the only place I can see. See if it works for you when you have the time.

 

[LovingOfLightning]

Very disappointed they've done this. There's stuff in my Photobucket account I haven't got any more so not being able to access it is infuriating.
ImgBB seems ok but their pictures are too large to post on forums without breaking the forum length, so yeah you can see the pictures, you just can't read the posts of the others as this makes the letters too small.
But glad to see the Photobucket changes have been apparently universally condemned as useless.
But will they listen? Will they buggery!