New Photobucket Charges

.
.Looks like all pics loaded through Photobucket to the forum are now lost
unless you cough up 4oo dollars per year......seems like a type of black mail.......
That's the way it seems anyway...................
...........................Billy...........................

yeah I have been hearing a bit about this of late, dunno what it all means except a lot of money for someone


Paul

Billy and Paul, Yes, complaints coming from many forums. It is a real shame as it destroys our Forums threads over many years.

I guess the admins will have to have a look whether we should upload all our photos to the forum servers in the future and whether that is feasible.

I guess someone pays for this storage one way or another and Photobucket was getting no income when being used this way.

At least we, as owners of the photos, have not lost our images, just no one else can see them.
Paul

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The annoying part about this caper is that there appears to have been no warning of the move....
I think most people would go along with a reasonable annual fee for a reasonable service.........
but to pull the pin like this is a bit rough, considering what a lot of people have put into
forums etc etc over the years..........
......................Billy.......................

And the amount they are asking is a massive impost for the non commercial hobby user.

I do not see any future for me using Photobucket.
Paul

Hi,

there are two costs that occur from hosting photos, the storing on disk which is really quite cheap these days and the amount of traffic(Bandwidth) that occurs when photos are uploaded or viewed(downloaded). Advertising pays for most of this in places like Photobucket.

So the problem is that by linking to images on their servers for other websites they are wearing the costs of the Storage and the Bandwidth but with no chance to show the advertisements which pay the bills, so no income, no service. $400 is really quite steep in the scheme of things and is probably the beginning of the end for PB.

For the HCVC site to store the photos, which we already do each time you post a photo as an attachment, in a way that allows you to have a 'User Gallery' type function requires extra software and if people want to use the same images on other sites then the Bandwidth costs become the HCVC sites issue to deal with. Not saying it couldn't or shouldn't be done, just as someone mentioned earlier, someone has to pay for it.

I have looked at Gallery software in the past for this site and they tended to either lack the features or were to complicated and that required lots of time to invest in supporting and educating people on how to use it. Forum pictures are always a difficult issue to deal with and is a compromise between making it easy for people to upload something and them being able to manage and reuse images. For this site where the upload is as an attachment is going for the ease of use, but there is no management function at all for the images just a big bit bucket of images.

Terry

There's also opinion that other free hosting sights will follow PB as there
advertising revenue shrinks.
The sad thing about photo bucket is the extortion there asking for, as you can
get your own website, domain name and email with photo hosting for about
$100.00 a year or less.

.
.So now the question for me , (and others ), is ,.....what do we do to get our pics to re-appear on the forum.........
I still have all the pics on my puter, so I have not lost them regardless of what PB does (or doesn't do ).......
May be we sit tight for a while to see what the out come is.......no doubt there is going to be an out cry, but,
if PB loses all non paying customers that may not worry them at all, but if paying customers start to leave,
that may be another story.
At least my later pics are safe as they have gone straight to the forum....by passing PB..
Yep ...very disappointing indeed.............
..........................Billy..............................

People that have loaded pics from PB and lost the pics in there posts on the forum
can go back ( a lot of hard work and very time consuming ) and load replacement pics straight from there computer to repair there thread/posts.
Sadly there's no easy way around it.
Thanks photo$ucket !

.
.Yep dno..............
I was to be thinkin that may be the case...............
..........................Billy.............................