Photobucket SUCKS - Here's Why...

Discussion in 'Anything Goes' started by Aced It, Sep 26, 2019.

  1. Aced It

    Aced It New Member

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    Like the title says, Photobucket sucks. Many of us use Photobucket to post motorcycle related photos in these and other forums. So I want to share some information regarding why us PB subscribers are having our photos blurred (with the PB watermark stamped on it) or removed from our posts.

    I have used Photobucket for over 10 years, linking many many pictures I've taken of various bike builds and just general sharing. This article from June 24, 2019 states in detail what has been happening with Photobucket, and what we as subscribers have been bombarded with. Mind you, my Photobucket account started as the free account over a decade ago and while I understand more storage usage can and will come at a cost, "extortion" is a keyword used to best describe what many users have been and are experiencing:

    Click to read the Article: Photobucket still has your photos, and it wants you to come back (After a disastrous year, Photobucket wants people to trust it with their memories)

    Now, for the sake of the above article "disappearing", here is a text copy minus the images:

    Photobucket still has your photos, and it wants you to come back
    After a disastrous year, Photobucket wants people to trust it with their memories
    By Dami Lee@dami_lee Jun 24, 2019, 10:37am EDT

    When the 10-year challenge went viral earlier this year, everyone who wanted to brag about how hot they used to be had the same idea for where to find those nostalgic photos: legacy photo hosting site Photobucket, which saw a massive uptick in traffic that week. “We found that people were like, ‘Where do I find that picture of myself 10 years ago? It’s probably on Photobucket,’” its CEO Ted Leonard tells me.

    The company is trying to make a comeback as more than just a site for forgotten photos, though usage has dramatically declined over the years, and it faces significantly more competition than when it first launched in 2003. Once accounting for 2 percent of US internet traffic by hosting photos for sites like eBay and Myspace, Photobucket is now somewhere in the range of the 1,500th most-visited website in the US, according to Alexa rankings. But under new management, the company is currently in the middle of an apology tour, trying to regain the public’s trust after a sudden, exorbitant price increase that had its remaining users accusing the company of extortion two years ago.

    Photobucket now wants to be seen as the site you can trust to store your photos forever. It’s a major turn from just a couple years ago — in June 2017, Photobucket quietly introduced a $399 annual fee to embed images on third-party sites. The site gave zero warning, just a blog post announcing its new terms of service, which didn’t mention the price change. When the changes went into effect, millions of hot-linked images on the internet broke overnight, only displaying a speedometer blaring the message, “PLEASE UPDATE YOUR ACCOUNT TO ENABLE 3RD PARTY HOSTING.” With 20 million users hosting images on sites like Amazon and eBay, Leonard guesses about 60 million images went dark during that time. The images were finally turned back on nearly a year later, when Photobucket replaced the executive team, including CEO John Corpus, and Leonard stepped in. “That was just the result of a short-sighted decision from the previous management team, in an effort to get immediate results,” Leonard says. “Saying, ‘we’re going to force you into a single plan and charge you $400’, that’s not a realistic price.”

    Photobucket now has more accessible plans that range from $4.99 a month for a 25GB Beginner plan, to an $11.99 unlimited image hosting Expert plan. Leonard stresses that the company will always have a free plan, which allows storage of up to 250 images. That’s a small number compared to what services from big tech companies like Google can offer, which is unlimited photo storage on Google Photos (as long as they’re compressed to 16 megapixels). But Leonard is confident that the people paying for subscriptions understand that hosting services cost money, and are drawn to the simplicity of the site. “I believe that we can happily coexist with the larger tech companies,” he says. “We pride ourselves on not being a social media platform. There’s room in the marketplace for companies that focus solely on photos.”

    In the nine months since the new pricing went into effect, Leonard says the paid subscriber base has increased 50 percent, with 90 percent of new subscriptions coming from legacy Photobucket members who had been on the free plan for an average of about eight years.
    The company prides itself on how it’s stuck around for the past 16 years as a reliable time capsule for people to revisit their memories. Last month, it introduced a “Bill of Rights” that promises that Photobucket will never delete its users’ photos, provided the photos don’t violate its terms of service. The news comes as a response to its competitor Flickr, which was acquired by SmugMug and began deleting user photos that went over the 1,000 photo limit for free accounts earlier in March. The outcry was immediate, and Flickr was hit with an exodus of users who opted to download their photos rather than to upgrade to a Pro subscription. The backlash to a once-free service asking for a subscription fee is familiar territory for Photobucket.

    “The internet started out as this free marketplace, where you could get all types — whether it’s videos, or content — anything for free,” Leonard says. “And we’re seeing a shift now.” With subscription-based models becoming the norm in nearly every industry, from streaming services like Spotify and Netflix to video games, Leonard believes there’s more of a willingness for people to start paying for photo storage as a subscription service as well.
    Photobucket has been shuffled between new owners over the years and is now a far tinier company than it once was. The company was originally acquired by News Corp. (along with Myspace) in 2007, then sold to Seattle mobile startup Ontela in 2010, which it merged with. Once employing 120 people at its height, Photobucket is now an independent company based out of a co-working space in Denver, Colorado with 11 full-time employees. Half of the company is dedicated to community management and customer service right now, but the company hopes to bring in more employees as subscriptions grow, particularly in the marketing and technical teams.

    I visited the site last week and somehow logged into my account, despite the fact that the Yahoo e-mail I signed up with no longer exists. I saw photos of the house I haven’t lived in for a decade, pictures from middle school hastily snapped from a point-and-shoot, and some header images I designed for my Xanga page (which also no longer exists) all sitting in the album how I left them.

    Leonard tells me Photobucket is rolling out with a new website and mobile app, but when I visited, the site looked more or less as how I remembered. Maybe that’s the point.


    <continued below>
     
  2. Aced It

    Aced It New Member

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    Here's where I'm completely flattened and feel like I've been trapped. I have over 7000+ photos in various albums on Photobucket. I have a couple of huge and highly visited build threads with dozens of pictures each that now are completely void of pictures. With Photobucket threatening to blur and stamp photos for the past few months unless I upgrade to their new plan(s), I refused and now just want to download all of my photos in the album format I created for each for organization and find another service. Yep, this also means I'll have to rebuild all of my threads too.

    So this past Monday I sent an inquiry to Photobucket's customer service: "Good morning, I would like to know how to go about downloading some of my photo albums to my PC, not just individual pictures. I thought there was a way to do this in the past. Please advise."

    A couple hours later, there response: "Hello, Unfortunately, we do not have an album download feature on the current site. At this time, you can only download images individually from your account. We understand that this can be time consuming. However, this is the only option we have at this time. We apologize for the inconvenience. The article below will provide you with instructions on how to download your photos individually.

    Copy or Download a Photo or Video

    A new Photobucket site will be released soon and it will have an album download feature. This will make downloading your content a lot easier."

    I replied: "The feature to download albums was available in the past. Where did it go? Why was it removed? I don't like where Photobucket has been headed in the past couple years. So there's nothing you can do to help me with this? When will the new version be released?"

    And their response: "The download album feature is broken and irreparable. This is why we are building a new site. The new site will be released in a month or so."

    I call bullsh*t. It is evident from the article above and my research that they REMOVED that option to prevent a mass exodus of very dissatisfied users. So when Photobucket sent me an email this morning to provide a review of their service from this interaction, this was my reply: "While I appreciate the prompt response to my inquiries, I am extremely dissatisfied with Photobucket's changes over the past couple years. I was able to download albums in the past and now it's defunct. I am a member of a few forums where I participate in informative discussions and "how-to" instructionals whereas my pictures are linked to my Photobucket account. Recently, PB demands MORE money to "upgrade" my account, AGAIN, and removes my photos from anywhere they are linked. I simply cannot download 7,000+ photos one-by-one and fix all these forum links and MUST HAVE the ability to do this by album. Trapped; that's how Photobucket has made me feel and I am about done being a paying customer. I simply will not be strong-armed into "upgrading", especially when key features have failed, or been removed."

    Seriously, I am done with their "service". They have, in my opinion, an irreparable reputation as of late. It will be worth my extra efforts to completely eliminate their lack of good business. They will not receive a dime more from me. Most if not all online photo storage services charge for their service over a certain amount of size and/or bandwidth. That's fine. I'll find one of them. I can also use my Google Drive to provide links to my photos, but that's just not as friendly as opening a thread and seeing the pictures all together. All this said, more modern message forums are allowing you to upload pictures to their servers in each thread you create or reply to.

    So for now, I apologize to anyone and everyone trying to read through some of my and others posts of interest and not making sense of the information for lack of pictures. F**k you Photobucket. There are other options. Options that will create more work and slow down the hands of internet users such as myself, but options nonetheless that will get us past this cyber-bullying.
     
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  3. Diving Pete

    Diving Pete Member

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    I removed my account & took off 900 pictures (all used in forums) & will NEVER use them again.
    I now use Flickr & even pay for it - have a pro account.
    Photobucket have no clue & the sooner they disappear into obscurity the happier I will be.
     
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  4. Aced It

    Aced It New Member

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    Yep. I'm following you down that road too. I'm trying out some free accounts like PostImage. Easy to use, but I don't know much about their reliability. Also looking at paid services too.
     
  5. fink

    fink Member

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    Have removed a fair bit of my stuff from them ,as well as spent ages replacing pictures in threads on forums. Bloody frustrating.
     
  6. FJ12rydertoo

    FJ12rydertoo Member

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    Yep, took all my photo's off PB a year or two ago, and moved my picture hosting to Imgur. I don't do
    many, but I'm glad I got them all of PB, and would never use them for anything ever again.
     
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  7. 34468 Randy

    34468 Randy Secret Insider

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    I think I got all my photos removed or at least copied from Photobucket when they first took away the free usage. I have never looked back. As mentioned earlier F*&K PB. I too started using Imgur for a while, and have not had any problem with them, but so not use them any more. I upload my photos to this site and post them from where they are saved.
     
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  8. Mind_Surfer

    Mind_Surfer New Member

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    They broke the internet, so to speak.

    Sent from my XT1031 using Tapatalk
     
  9. mello dude

    mello dude Administrator

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    I copied my entire PB album of about 1500 images and filed on my PC hardrive once the announcement of a large fee for 3rd party posting. I went over to Smugmug. I think they charge $69 a year on it, so I dont expect they will do a shafting of customers like PB. - I did take the previous entire PB album and uploaded to Smugmug and have that available as I want. Also, I continue to upload lots of motorcycle stuff to the site. Works great, I like it.
     
  10. Aced It

    Aced It New Member

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    I did some research and found a couple programs to override PB's deletion of the album download feature. There may be more out there, but this is where I started and ended, with the second being my choice:

    Ref: My search results


    photobucket_bulk_download.md
    https://gist.github.com/philipjewell/a9e1eae2d999a2529a08c15b06deb13d

    This is a script program that "tricks the request to the image file is coming from Photobucket themselves by definining --referer "http://s.photobucket.com/" allowing you to download the file without dealing with the redirect to their upgrade/update image." I tried this method and because of the securities in place at my work the script would not run. It may work at home, and/or it may work for you.


    Photobucket Album Downloader (Unlimit)
    https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/photobucket-album-downloa/jmpbbfglflhdhbmimlcacoojpkeopelc

    This is a Google Chrome extension. It costs $1.99 for the download and is the method I chose because it will download your original file size and not compress the image size. It incorporates a nice radio button right along side your Photobucket window. Simply select the album, press the "Download" button and it runs, updating you with a status bar as it completes each file up to the total in that album. It does not retain the album name, so the best thing to do is create a folder structure on your desktop and when the files are complete and the folder opens prompting you where to save, simply select the mirror folder you created on your desktop. It saves as a compressed file. Just unzip the file and complete your set-up. Simple. Easy. Much easier than downloading one file at a time, and worth the $1.99 if not just for the fact that it's NOT going into Photobucket's pocket.

    Still in the process of downloading as I type this. Of course, the nightmare of going backwards and trying to update old threads with whatever new image storage service I choose still exists, it's a start. I'll post an update back.


    [​IMG]


    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]
     
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  11. James Bond

    James Bond Member

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    Yeah, this is clearly online extortion. Right up there with the crime of hacking. I just went to my account and they are offering a free account that holds 250 pics allegedly then they offer you the paid upgrades with pop up ads galore. This reminds me of why I canceled Netflix for good this time. For the second time, they doubled my rates with no advance notice. When I cancelled them, I still get these "won't you come back to Netflix" emails. They get deleted. There are other places to get movies.

    To put it as politely as possible while still maintaining accuracy, companies that do things like this fall in the category of mother-fuckers and assholes. Reject stupidity. I'll give Photobucket money at the exact time that hell freezes over. People have memories when overt stupidity happens.

    BTW, I have used "Snapfish" for years. It's a better place.
     
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  12. Aced It

    Aced It New Member

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    THIS was just emailed to me under the title, "WARNING: You need to take action.":

    FuckYouPhotobucket.jpg

    THIS is yet another reason I'm KICKING THE BUCKET.

    Don't you threaten me PB. F*ck you. Your days of having me as a paying client are over PB; soon, very soon. I've uploaded all my pics to PostImg now, but I'm still reluctant to use linking anymore. PostImg went through a .org to .cc change a couple years ago, and that would still be a nightmare to fix links again. And trying to update pic-links in all of my threads is proving to be very cumbersome. Having forums that use their own upload system helps though.
     
  13. James Bond

    James Bond Member

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    That's what is known as extortion. Fuck them.
     
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  14. 34468 Randy

    34468 Randy Secret Insider

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    Actually, to me, that message sent, under the name of photo bucket, looks more like photo bucket was hacked. AND by clicking any links within, opens the recipient here to possibly being victimized in a fraudulent way. Don't get me wrong though. Photo bucket really does suck, but I doubt that message was actually sent by them.

    "WARNING. You need to take action." should be a warning to everyone in any message you get. Dead ringer for a scam.
     
  15. Aced It

    Aced It New Member

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    Oh, it's definitely a scam ... by Photofuckit themselves!

    It came from a legit source. Seriously, this is how they are trying to reel you in. Ever since their management change, it seems strong-arming is the tactic of choice. And that's just it; it's a choice you are given, so that's how they legally get away with it. You don't like, you can leave; that's pretty much it as I see it. Also received this one the other day; same title, "WARNING...) . A bit less intimidating with the pretty scenery as opposed to the in-your-face bold black and red shit:

    unnamed.jpg
     
  16. bk94si

    bk94si Member

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    I've gotten multiple emails like that from them even though I have erased all my pictures.
     
  17. Aced It

    Aced It New Member

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    I officially emailed customer service just now to cancel my account with PhotoFuckit. I planned this some time ago, but needed time to copy (screen clip) several of my extensive posts with pics on various sites so that I can fix them later. For the past few months PB has had issues on top of their own scamming with pictures either not retrievable, watermarked for no reason and/or broken links outside and from within users accounts, including mine (see pic below). I'm done. Mentally I've been done for months. So let's see how long it takes for their response knowing that they will lose yet another long term customer. I just LOVE the automated response *rolls eyes* ...... I'll keep you posted for sure.



    PB Sucks 2020-01-10.JPG PB Sucks Cancel Letter 2020-01-10.JPG
     
  18. fink

    fink Member

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    Their response is indeed laughable.
    Bet you would get a quicker response if you missed a payment.
     
  19. Aced It

    Aced It New Member

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    Yes on both accounts. The best part of their response is, "Due to the high volume of tickets we've received, our response time is longer than usual." - I'll bet that is due to all the cancellations and complaints of non-working accounts over the past few months that have yet to be resolved, yet they're still demanding payment.
     
  20. 34468 Randy

    34468 Randy Secret Insider

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    How are you paying, via automatic charging to your credit card. If so, I would think you need to put stop payments through your credit card company. Hope it works out for you. If it is a pre-payment schedule, once they have your money, you are not likely to get it back without a horrendous fight.
     
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