Photobucket

[Hurricane]

Firstly, sorry for adding these comments to the Sticky - Forum Cruise Reports - so here's a dedicated thread for it.

Well, it seems that the free Photobucket facility has decided to charge for people like us wanting to show our photos on these forums.
See the discussion here:-
http://www.ybw.com/forums/showthread.php?481957-Photobucket
and here
http://www.ybw.com/forums/showthread.php?481679-Photobucket-and-the-forum


It seems, though, that some accounts are still working.
This is the example that was posted on the Sticky thread.

A working Photobucket account
[IMG]http://i167.photobucket.com/albums/u125/dpb101/Wareham%20July%202017/IMG_3215_zpsegrnsrhk.jpg[/IMG]

And here's an example from my Photobucket account
[IMG]http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj158/mikerothery/IMG_3084_zps16fe0bd6.jpg[/IMG]

 

[andy59]

Mine is ok , only 11% full though

 

[Sticky Fingers]

Becoming a bit of a worldwide issue - see this news article:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40492668

 

[MapisM]

And here's an example from my Photobucket account

LOL, it seems that your pics are rather popular, M....
Does anyone have an idea of where the "3rd party hosting" limit is placed?
I've never seen that before, but maybe it's a limit which has always been there, 'dunno...

Edit: ops, didn't see Scala post before writing mine - obviously it's something new!

 

[Hurricane]

Mine is ok , only 11% full though

I've always resized images before uploading to make the thread load them quickly.
I've hundreds of photos in Photobucket but I'm still only 2.87% full.
It can only mean that they don't like the bandwidth that my account is handling.

I've given up with them.
I'm not going to upload another photo to Photobucket - EVER.
I think it has shown that we need to be in control of our data and not be in the hands of others.
To that end, I think I'm going to host my own internet server and patch all my images through a domain name that I can change later (using forwarding)
I know that a more sensible solution is to use some cheap web hosting service but I have other uses for my own server.
Also, I could use other photo services like Flickr but I think that would be like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire - once bitten once shy.

I have some hardware and will be installing Linux running Apache/PHP etc sometime this week.
I was thinking of writing a script that loads the full resolution of the image I want to post and resizing it to the size I want in my YBW posts.
That way, I can then index into any of my photos that I have stored.

I'll post the results of this back onto this thread sometime over the next week or so - when/if I get it working.

 

[petem]

Mike,

There are loads of PHP gallery scrips. Gallery and Coppermine used to be popular.

 

[Hurricane]

Mike,

There are loads of PHP gallery scrips. Gallery and Coppermine used to be popular.

Yep - been looking at those.
I haven't yet loaded any - quite a few are not being actively developed - piwigo seems to have lots of support and is active though.
All seem to be too complicated for what I'm looking for.
I've built the server (rather a grand name for the kit I'm sticking onto the internet).
I'm going to install Apache and PHP later today and see how well it works.

 

[petem]

Yep - been looking at those.
I haven't yet loaded any - quite a few are not being actively developed - piwigo seems to have lots of support and is active though.
All seem to be too complicated for what I'm looking for.
I've built the server (rather a grand name for the kit I'm sticking onto the internet).
I'm going to install Apache and PHP later today and see how well it works.

I don't need to tell you but you'll also need to open the Firewall ports 80/443 on your router and be prepared to be hit by lots of hackers.

Another option would be to install your own software onto a hosted PHP server. That way you'd have the benefit of being in control of the software without the hassle of having a web server on the Internet.

 

[Hurricane]

I don't need to tell you but you'll also need to open the Firewall ports 80/443 on your router and be prepared to be hit by lots of hackers.

Another option would be to install your own software onto a hosted PHP server. That way you'd have the benefit of being in control of the software without the hassle of having a web server on the Internet.

Yep - absolutely.
My home system is made up of two routers - one external to the internet - the other internal to my LAN.
The external one will have this internet server and the appropriate ports forwarded to it.
My internal router remains as my main firewall.

And, yes, I agree that I could use a hosted server - they don't cost much but I fancied one of my own to test things out.
The idea that I have for hosted images is that I would include a domain name (that I own) in the link address.
The domain name would then forward the base of the images addresses to the "current" service that is hosting the images.
All I have to do is to have a directory hierarchy that can be copied from my own (or my own managed) resource and then map/forward the domain name to it.
Using this concept, I can then either use my own server or a hosted server and be able to switch whenever I want - unlike the situation that we now have with Photobucket (where they have control of all the links/addresses.

 

[CX54WEK]

My photobucket account was also playing up in the same manner so I have just switched to a different provider.

 

[mlines]

The problem with using a hosted service is that you can be at the mercy of other users also hosted on the same service. I used 1&1 for a long time but was affected by two things:

1. Performance - occasional severe performance drops. As this was a website hosted solution rather than a server image I assume other sites on the same server instance were affecting the performance
2. IP address poisoning, as other websites exist on the same IP address or same subnet range, if they spam the Internet the IP address gets listed in spam monitoring sites and your website gets blacklisted.

I would go for a solution where you either have your own server or you get a service where you get a server of your own and then load one of the secured images that are available. Whilst the hosted server still works on shared principles using VM technology at least you are not sharing the underlying operating system that you would do on a website hosting solution.

 

[jfm]

Thanks Hurricane for this report. I've just checked and my photobucket account has been "done" so my pictures no longer appear in my prior posts on here. How annoying.

Anyone know how much it costs to restore normal service, and how I do it?

 

[Hurricane]

Thanks Hurricane for this report. I've just checked and my photobucket account has been "done" so my pictures no longer appear in my prior posts on here. How annoying.

Anyone know how much it costs to restore normal service, and how I do it?

You upgrade your Photoshop account and pay $400 pa

IMO, it is annoying but not worth that kind of money.

 

[petem]

You upgrade your Photoshop account and pay $400 pa

Jeez, that's expensive.

I'll be looking at Google "Drive" or Microsoft "One Drive" I think.

Pete

 

[Boat2016]

Jeez, that's expensive.

I'll be looking at Google "Drive" or Microsoft "One Drive" I think.

Pete

Have just looked at both of them and neither seem to be anything like photo bucket and not at all obvious how you can use in the same way, are there any other alternatives that can do the same as photo bucket?

 

[vas]

I noticed yesterday that various pics by JFM and others were showing this stupid pb logo...
Thing is the whole forum is a invaluable source of info this way it's destroyed!
I was reading a 2015 thread on stabs and only Bart's pics where there :disgust:

glad I can use my own server to store and serve the MiToS rebuilt thread pics, but paying 400 pa is way too much for such a service, although going through a zillion pics to move them somewhere else is pointless and impossible as you cannot even edit your own old posts after a few months or so. So what's going to happen to the two Match threads, Hurricanes, JTB and other's upgrades and so many more???

cheers

V.

 

[pks1702]

Always my concern for photo storage with free sites.

I store on an external hard drive but upload everything to Smugmug - It has decent functionality.

Not free but not a lot of money.

https://www.smugmug.com/plans

 

[jfm]

I noticed yesterday that various pics by JFM and others were showing this stupid pb logo...
Thing is the whole forum is a invaluable source of info this way it's destroyed!
I was reading a 2015 thread on stabs and only Bart's pics where there :disgust:

glad I can use my own server to store and serve the MiToS rebuilt thread pics, but paying 400 pa is way too much for such a service, although going through a zillion pics to move them somewhere else is pointless and impossible as you cannot even edit your own old posts after a few months or so. So what's going to happen to the two Match threads, Hurricanes, JTB and other's upgrades and so many more???

cheers

V.

As you say Vas it is just not feasible to move a big back catalogue of old picture links, even if the edit time limit were removed. So loads of old picture threads on this forum, and zillions of other forums, are now destroyed. It feels like photobucket has mugged us for $400/year.

Bigger worry may be that photobucket might now fail. Their usage will shrink, advertising will therefore shrink, and their revenue from the $400 charges will be small because few folks will pay so much while there are cheaper alternatives. Then all the old picture threads on this forum and others will be destroyed forever (except MiToS rebuild :encouragement::encouragement. Logic says photobucket will see sense and make the price sensible like $25 pa or something

 

[Hurricane]

As you say Vas it is just not feasible to move a big back catalogue of old picture links, even if the edit time limit were removed. So loads of old picture threads on this forum, and zillions of other forums, are now destroyed. It feels like photobucket has mugged us for $400/year.

Bigger worry may be that photobucket might now fail. Their usage will shrink, advertising will therefore shrink, and their revenue from the $400 charges will be small because few folks will pay so much while there are cheaper alternatives. Then all the old picture threads on this forum and others will be destroyed forever (except MiToS rebuild :encouragement::encouragement. Logic says photobucket will see sense and make the price sensible like $25 pa or something

Here is a little suggestion.
Maybe the YBW moderators could remove the Edit restriction.
And we could then reinstate some of our old threads.
I'm in the process of doing something like that anyway for the other forum that I run at Sant Carles.
I'm currently downloading all my Photobucket Albums (as most will know, they have random characters generated within the links.)
I will then upload my albums to another provider (my own internet server for the moment) and then all that is required is a find and replace within the post of the base image address.
If we could have access to editing our old posts, we could recover some of the images within the main interesting threads.
It sounds complicated but I'm about half way through my Photobucket Album.
I'm definitely going to do this for my photos in our SCMCHAT forum but if YBW could give us access to editing out old threads that would be good as well.

 

[scubaman]

I've recently moved to Google Photos (from Dropbox) which is quite attractive in that it offers unlimited free storage, when allowing them to compress the photos. I did a little search on their compression and their algorithm seems pretty amazing, as you'd be VERY hard pressed to spot any differences between the original jpeg and one after their compression.

There are no guarantees with Google of course, but of the major players in the field, they most probably are the last ones standing when others have fallen. As it is, their benefit is in the gazillions of pictures they receive and what they can do with them in the AI driven future. There might be a price on the service some day, who knows.

I'm primarily using it as a personal photo journal, but with a few extra clicks you can get a direct link to photos, which can then be used between the img tags. Instructions here -> http://www.rainsberger.ca/2016/02/19/direct-link-to-image-in-google-photos-for-html-image-tag/. The resulting url is very messy, not that it matters a lot of course.

Not yet sure if this is the solution for forum use, but looks like it could work.

Trouble with Photobucket is that the stunt they've pulled appears a last desperate attempt to get some cash quickly, so I wouldn't count on them to be around for a very long time.

A massive shame though and pretty disastrous to the forum.

Example URL: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/8...2jbBk5-z92ixRN7a1tPJZVTEQ7mAcQ=w2558-h1436-no