blank photos,....AGAIN, photobucket. is back to SCREWING PEOPLE

deQuincey

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i have discovered that all my thread photos had virtually become unavaliable

i went to photobucket and found this,
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Types of Accounts, Pricing and Limits

  • Visiting : There is no cost to visit the Site or to register as a Member.
  • Free account : Each individual Member gets one free account that provides 2 GB of free storage or space available for your original photo files, or videos under 10min. The free account does not allow any image linking or 3rd party image hosting. If a free account Member exceeds their Content Limit, their account will be immediately suspended and they will need to become a “Paying Member” (defined below) in order to continue accessing their account. You can upgrade to a Plus account at any time.
  • Ad-free Account : The Ad-free Account offers Members the ability to use the Site without seeing any third party banner advertisements when logged into your Ad-free Account (note, viewers of your images within Photobucket will see ads unless they, too, have Plus accounts and you will continue to see Photobucket offers and announcements). This account level is available for $2.49 / month, payable by the Member on a monthly recurring basis.
  • Plus Account : The Plus Account offers several paid options that may give the Paying Member more storage, bandwidth, 3rd party image hosting, image linking and/or other services as outlined below. Once and during such period of time in which you subscribe to and pay for a Plus Account, we will consider you a "Paying Member." Please note that all Plus Account subscriptions are billed annually at the commencement of the service. Photobucket may also offer a monthly billing option for its Plus Accounts (see terms and restrictions, below).
  • Available Plus Account Plans : Photobucket offers the following Plus Account Plans:
o Plus 50 Plan: 52 GB of Storage for $59.99 / Year. The Plus 50 Plan does not allow any image linking or 3rd party image hosting.

o Plus 100 Plan: 102 GB of Storage for $99.99 / Year. The Plus 100 Plan allows for unlimited image linking but does not allow 3rd party image hosting.

o Plus 500 Plan: 500 GB of Storage and unlimited bandwidth for $399.99 / Year. The Plus 500 Plan allows for unlimited image linking and unlimited 3rd party image hosting.
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So i need to become a plus500 plan user for 399,99 usd a year, sounds very promising,...

anyone else in this situation ?
 

Gransin

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Have you been uploading photos to your photobucket account for free until now?

I have an account, but as soon as I hit the 2GB-for-free-limit some years ago I had to start paying for more space, and so I did. They had a Plus 20 plan (20GB) for 2,99€/month and that was reasonable IMO. I'm still paying that every month.
But if you need to jump to the Plus 500 plan straight away, it seems like you have been uploading alot, for a long time, and for free? Is that correct? In that case, there must have been a bug on their site?
 
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Markos

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Photobucket is shafting their customers... It's a big to do for forum members like yourselves. You will hear me screaming in a year when Verizon screws with my Flickr terms.
 

deQuincey

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well i have done nothing odd, i probably have less than 2GB, and yes i have never paid them
as far as i remember all the pics are related to the car DIYs
how can i possibly pay 400 euro/year to let others see the photos that explain my job on the car ?
i am not geting any benefit from this
only trying to help others
so strange

i any case i would understand that they ask a fee for any new photos, but to sequestrate the old ones is a felony IMHO
 

Gransin

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How can i possibly pay 400 euro/year to let others see the photos that explain my job on the car ?

After reading more carefully, I just realised that I'm in the same boat as you, as soon as my annual plus 20 plan is over..
I didn't realise at first that you had to buy the most expensive package to be able to link and embed photos. Sigh.
Well, there is talk on the internet that photobucket might have to consider a better/cheaper solution for us customers to avoid losing too many, but who knows if that will happen.
All I know is that I wont pay that amount of money to display my photos, the option is to change to another image hosting site, but it's alot of work to edit all the old forum posts with new photo-links..

Any recommendations on other image hosting sites?
 

m5bb

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I use Photobucket too. Don't think the have cut me off but need to check some sites where photos are hosted from Photobucket.
Yes, this has been all over the internet in the last couple days.
Photobucket just changed their user agreement without any notice.
Here's the story.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/photob...ash-after-breaking-images-with-ransom-demand/

There are other places to do the same thing as photobucket.
Look around.
I also use Dropbox.

Gary
 

Stevehose

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I use google photos, I don't think there is a limit if the photos are low res such as the type used here.
 

mulberryworks

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Yes, the linking from other sites is what has been turned off. Since linked photos take up expensive bandwidth, (not much for each one, but collectively it's quite a bill) and don't return any ad revenue, they felt they had to make a change. Making people pay a huge amount, with no notice, certainly seems predatory. I feel it could be their undoing.

I've stayed away from linking photos and have been uploading to the e9coupe.com site itself. By down sizing the photos to just the right size to display on screen I've been keeping the file sizes smaller than the huge files that come from modern cameras.

I don't know how much space this site has or it's costs. When the subject came up recently, admins have said that donations have kept pace with costs.
I also have my own blog site where I will post more and larger photos when I post about my restoration progress here when I begin the work in a month or so.

Ian
 

m5bb

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I get 5.75 GB on Dropbox for free.
If you sign up using this link both of us will get 500 MB more.
https://db.tt/z2HgaX8m

I'm going to move all my Photobucket photos to Dropbox.
There is really no way to know how many are linked to other sites.
Gary
 

JFENG

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Photobucket is shafting their customers... It's a big to do for forum members like yourselves. You will hear me screaming in a year when Verizon screws with my Flickr terms.

is not Photobucket a for profit business which should maximize ROI and ROA?
 

Markos

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is not Photobucket a for profit business which should maximize ROI and ROA?

Got to keep the shareholders happy... :D

Photobucket is a consumer service, with regular consumer (non professional) service agreements in place. Much like your cell phone or cable provider. The major difference is that cell and cable usage (with exception to DVR content) is all real-time. If your plan changes it affects you now. It doesn’t affect 2-10 years of historical interaction like photobucket does.

Now, what happens when your cell phone or cable contract is up? Nothing, the service agreement stays in place. You are effectively grandfathered. They don’t change until you want to modify your service.

If this wasn’t a terrible decision photobucket wouldn’t have recently backpedaled. One of the most important measures within a digital service company is customer retention. Customer churn is the most guarded number. Business makes up for customer churn by new customer acquisition. I’m not sure what happened over the last two quarters, but I would imagine that photobucket customer acquisition has taken a massive hit over the years while companies like instagram have had exponential growth. That means that photobucket needs to do everything possible to retain existing customers and stop the bleeding.

The other thing is that photobucket is that the majority of their ad hits in their obnoxious website are by forum viewers intentionally or unintentionally clicking on the pictures. It’s a one publisher to many subscriber relationship when a photo is hosted. The ad revenue from their customers logging in and hosting photos can’t be nearly as significant. So they stop hosting the photos and nobody is clicking on them so see the barrage of pop ups and banners. No more little bookmarks or banners on photos.

They decided to rip the bandaid off and hope for a high conversion rate on free customers to paid. What they failed to account for is that their service sucks, the user experience of their site is dreadful and severely outdated, and nobody really wants to use it anymore.

Lastly and most importantly, Flickr just recently (last week) announced a chance their TOS on free accounts. There is now a rather small photo limit. Photobucket likely enabled the free hosting once again to pickup flickr customers.
 

Markos

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Taking queue from the OP’s recent vocalization about thread placement... Moving this to OT as it has absolutely nothing to do with e9’s or BMW’s for that matter.

i am guessing why is this e9 related ?
 

Markos

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Hi Folks @deQuincey and @Orangener ,

I’m all for putting together a fund to activate a one year full subscription on your accounts. I know that you can afford it yourself. I also know why you have chosen not to pay it, and nobody can blame you for taking a stand. I also can’t blame anyone for not wanting to cycle through hundreds of posts to correct bad links or blurry images. I’m slowly doing this with flickr.

If you activate your account the forum software should cache the photos. I will verify with @dang. What are your thoughts on a PhotoBucket fund?
 

jpg10

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Hi,

I've found a way of getting images out as I've been slowly going through deQuinceys excellent handmade trunk container post and collecting the images as I normally copy pages or images for work that I'll need to carry out in the future as I've lost stuff in the past, its a bit fiddly but I've got those if you want me to upload them or send them to you. I can get other tutorials if there's a preference, but any I do get I can send to you to repopulate the pages with the "released" images.

Next ones I'll be hunting for will be the bonnet torsion arms as one of mine was missing so need to either rebuild/recreate them or go to gas shocks replacements.

Cheers,

jpg10
 

Bmachine

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I am certainly willing to participate to a fund to keep dQ's images visible. His tutorials have helped me many many times.

However that may only be a bandage solution as this issue will rear its ugly head again each and every year. Obviously this would take a good bit of work but I would recommend ditching Photobucket altogether and transferring all images to this site where they will be safe for posterity. Admins, is this a job that could be split among different people who are willing to help?
 

Markos

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I am certainly willing to participate to a fund to keep dQ's images visible. His tutorials have helped me many many times.

However that may only be a bandage solution as this issue will rear its ugly head again each and every year. Obviously this would take a good bit of work but I would recommend ditching Photobucket altogether and transferring all images to this site where they will be safe for posterity. Admins, is this a job that could be split among different people who are willing to help?

Reread my entire post... :)
 

Markos

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@deQuincey


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