Lost Pictures

[Sid Matheny]

This is from a update June 28, 2017.


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.

[Scott Shepherd]

I've seen a lot, and I mean a LOT of trashed threads on forums because of this new rule. It's happening for people that have over 2GB of photos on Photobucket. If you have less than 2GB, everything seems to remain in tact. The vast majority of forum owners won't even consider paying for the extra storage or bandwidth to allow people to upload their photos directly to their forums. SMC does that at their own cost. I see a lot of people scrambling now to register their own personal sites just so they can upload the photos to forums. The minimum cost associated with doing that is about $5 a month. So people will spend $60 a year or more to be able to upload photos to forums so they remain in tact, but they won't pay $6 a year as a contributor to have their photos uploaded directly on the forum! News flash, if someone had their own domain and they upload their own photos to link to, they can still stop paying for that hosting, have all their photos show as broken links on forums, thus trashing all the forums again.

The best and cheapest solution is to upload photos directly to the forum. We are LUCKY that SMC allows and encourages it! You don't have to be a contributor ($6 a year) to make that happen either. However, before paying someone else $60 a year to put your photos out there, consider paying SMC $6 a year to show your appreciation for them being smart enough to see the problems associated with linked photos and put the tools in place to reduce the site's exposure to the problem.

[Scott Shepherd]

::::correction::::: I'm now seeing reports of people with less than 2GB of photos getting hit with the same thing. It's always been said that it was because of 3rd party linking to other sites (which is bizarre because in their own site, they give you a button to click to grab the link so you can paste it onto other sites). It was thought that as long as you were under 2GB, the linking issues wasn't going to be a problem for you. However, people are now seeing their accounts locked and all their photos being unavailable with accounts having less than 2GB worth of photos.

If you have a Photobucket account and you link photos to other forums or sites, you might want to get to your account while you can because they are locking the accounts up pretty quickly. Asking people to pay $400 a year to get access back is just nuts.

[glenn bradley]

I often preach the wisdom of posting your pics into the forum site to assure thread and post integrity. I know a lot of folks think posting pics into the forum is a hassle and fraught with procedural problems but, it's easier than mass recovery efforts that many will not undertake. This means there is a lot of history here that will at least lose value and at most become useless. However this Photobucket thing works out, I will again wave the flag for posting into the forum site going forward. You can not control what a third party will do on the internet. It is a convenience service, not a publicly regulated utility .

[Bruce Page]

Yes.
On the plus side, the new forum software that we will likely be switching to later this year makes it extremely easy to post pictures. Hopefully, people will choose it over an off-site hosting service.

I often preach the wisdom of posting your pics into the forum site to assure thread and post integrity. I know a lot of folks think posting pics into the forum is a hassle and fraught with procedural problems but, it's easier than mass recovery efforts that many will not undertake. This means there is a lot of history here that will at least lose value and at most become useless. However this Photobucket thing works out, I will again wave the flag for posting into the forum site going forward. You can not control what a third party will do on the internet. It is a convenience service, not a publicly regulated utility .

As I mentioned above, the new forum software we are moving to (xenForo) makes picture posting very easy. You can even drag & drop your photos directly into it.

[Mike Kreinhop]

As a photographer, I prefer to keep the majority of my images on my Smugmug site where I have complete control of them. If I decide later that I don't want my linked images displayed, and can't edit my posts to remove them, it is fairly easy to break the link at the host site and without affecting the text content in the post.

The offer of using SMC as the image host will likely appeal to the majority of the members, and is certainly easier than maintaining a separate hosting account. Since I already have the host account for other purposes, I am content to continue using it.

[Ed Labadie]

Photobucket has been circiling the drain for a long time........IMO, the adds keep getting worse, making the site almost un-useable.
Their add income isn't covering costs anymore, this is a last ditch effort to keep the lights on, it won't end well for anyone.

Ed

[Jim Koepke]

As a photographer, I prefer to keep the majority of my images on my Smugmug site where I have complete control of them. If I decide later that I don't want my linked images displayed, and can't edit my posts to remove them, it is fairly easy to break the link at the host site and without affecting the text content in the post.

The offer of using SMC as the image host will likely appeal to the majority of the members, and is certainly easier than maintaining a separate hosting account. Since I already have the host account for other purposes, I am content to continue using it.

For many posts on SMC, the text is meaningless without the images.

Over the years I have seen many posts become next to useless, as sources of information, because of image links being broken.

It is difficult for me to imagine wanting to remove any of my images from past posts. Even the embarrassing ones may help someone else or have value in another way.

jtk

[Keith Outten]

Sometime in the future all of the free picture hosting sites will disappear. The list of those who went offline over the years is pretty long now so its reasonable to think that they all have a short future as the costs associated with hosting continues to increase.

This morning I had to remove a major thread here because the OP's pictures were all dead links. This made the whole thread useless when you consider that it was a "How To" kind of post, without the pictures your could not grasp the intent of the thread. What is sad about having to remove entire threads is that the people who took their time to reply and post their pictures in this particular thread also lost their posts. People give freely of their time here to help their peers and to contribute their expertise so everyone loses when pictures and other file attachments become dead links.

Please upload your file attachments here so they will remain online for everyone to enjoy. I have also mentioned in the past that you might have a son, daughter, or grandchild who finds what you have shared after you are gone...think about how precious it might be to you if you could find pictures and posts your grandfather made that were still available for your family. This February will be our 15th anniversary, all of the pictures that have been uploaded here are still available for you to enjoy. I don't have the current total but I can tell you that in 2014, 2015, and 2016 there were well over 50,000 pictures uploaded to SawMill Creek.

I have never assumed ownership of any files or text that anyone has shared here. All information, pictures and other file attachments have always remained the property of the owner and cannot be used by anyone other than SawMill Creek without written permission from the owner.

[Barry McFadden]

I have posted a lot of pictures to a photography site that I belong to .... all from Photobucket. When I go back a few years and pull the posts up the pictures still show but many other people's pictures I check don't. As the sample web page I'm including here from Photobucket shows on the right hand side, there are 4 ways to link to. I always chose the "direct" link. I'm wondering if that link would actually put the picture on the hosting site instead of just linking it back to Photobucket? Maybe someone with more knowledge than me in this matter could confirm whether this could be true or not.

Photobucket.jpg