Photobucket - Costing $399 pa Now?

[DrZhivago]

Well DrZhivago.......I have just used Parksy's instructions to the letter and as you can see the instructions still work for my particular free Photobucket a/c.

It seems to cut off after a certain volume of downloads (I read 2Gb somewhere). WoodlandsCamper (for example) said he is being cut off while having only 20 pics on Photobucket, but the picture size must be multiplied by the number of downloads. Every time one of us (or an un-registered lurker) sees one of his pics on this forum, it is another download; it can soon tot up.

Speaking of time please bear in mind that Parksy is a volunteer and as such gives his time freely for the good of the forum. I hope your post was not meant to be critical because it can be read that way

I certainly did not mean to criticise Parksy, he's doing a great job It is just that Parksy said : Until we have further information from admin there's not much else that we can do about uploading pictures. I was pointing out that the current advice is contained in a post by himself, not by admin, so I was suggesting that he edits it at least to reflect the current situation regarding Photobucket and that eg Flickr could be used instead.

 

[LizziePope]

Hi everyone. Apologies for the slow reply, I've been out the office. Just to reassure you that we are looking into this.

 

[Gabsgrandad]

Flickr -- tried to sign up , but keeps coming back to get a Yahoo e mail address, does it mean 'adding' a further address? -- Anyone know?

 

[Martin24]

Instructions or not I can't cope with it all so until I can just click a button to select a photo from my albums on the laptop I won't be posting any pictures.

Lets face it, it took years for me to go pink and that was on about the 20th attempt

 

[Parksy]

Speaking of time please bear in mind that Parksy is a volunteer and as such gives his time freely for the good of the forum. I hope your post was not meant to be critical because it can be read that way

I certainly did not mean to criticise Parksy, he's doing a great job It is just that Parksy said : Until we have further information from admin there's not much else that we can do about uploading pictures. I was pointing out that the current advice is contained in a post by himself, not by admin, so I was suggesting that he edits it at least to reflect the current situation regarding Photobucket and that eg Flickr could be used instead.

Thanks for your kind words Bill
Unfortunately I've had an extremely busy couple of days at home at the same time that my mainframe computer has decided to produce 'the black screen of death'.
I haven't had time to resolve the computer issue, and it's awkward, can be time consuming and can lead to mistakes if I attempt to carry out larger edits via my phone.
I know that Photobucket have placed restrictions on their free hosting service and as previously mentioned there are other free hosting services available which can be found via Google.
Admin decide the method to be used for.the posting of photographs and images and they are currently deciding how best to resolve the issues surrounding Photobucket, which is another reason why I haven't yet edited the instructions that I provided some time ago. When I know what approach forum admin decide to take I'll post the relevant instructions, in the meantime I'll delete the sticky containing the Photobucket instructions if that will help.

 

[DrZhivago]

Flickr -- tried to sign up , but keeps coming back to get a Yahoo e mail address, does it mean 'adding' a further address? -- Anyone know?

I have just signed up to Flickr myself out of interest - disposable e-mail address though, I don't want their spam. I had not realised they are owned by Yahoo, and basically you are sent to a page to open a Yahoo account, which I did. Seems that after that you log in with your Yahoo credentials. Nevermind that I already had a Yahoo account (different name and email though) for other reasons and did not want the two mixed up, I guess they did not notice. I uploaded a test picture and there it is below.

A thing I don't like about Flickr is that they make logging out hard to find. And when I did and went back later they "greeted" me with my name, which I find creepy like they are shadowing me; but they required me to log in anyway. I shall now delete their cookies and not use them again if I can help it. But is is an option for people.

When I know what approach forum admin decide to take I'll post the relevant instructions, in the meantime I'll delete the sticky containing the Photobucket instructions if that will help.

Glad to hear things are moving on this Parksy; I think that pictures have been drying up a bit

 

[Gafferbill]

I have had the email from Photobucket asking for payment...........so any pictures I have posted on this forum are about to disappear

 

[ProfJohnL]

It would be a real shame if we were to loose the possibility of posting pictures becasue of other sites changing their position on hosting. But it does not really surprise me, as someone has to pay for the internet by some means.

I don't know what the costs involved are but I always thought strange that this forum made posting pictures quite difficult by forcing users to use hosting sites. Computer memory is relative cheap these days, I do wonder if Haymarket might consider adding a few gigabytes of memory to their servers to enable hosting forum pictures, perhaps limiting the size of each image and the amount available to each user, and by using some of the compression software available to make storage more efficient it may not be too expensive in the grand scheme of things.

 

[WoodlandsCamper]

.. and also inhibiting the quoting of pictures?

 

[DrZhivago]

It would be a real shame if we were to loose the possibility of posting pictures

I've just had a look at the Photography sub-forum, and it is a disaster area Those pictures replaced by the nag notice won't come back to the forum now unless the owners repost to a different hosting service and re-link - or pay Photobucket's fee!

I don't know what the costs involved are .... Computer memory is relative cheap these days,

I think it is the cost of the bandwidth that is the main expense, not the memory or storage. I think you could store every picture on this forum on the average home PC. HDs are only around £50/Tb these days.

I always thought strange that this forum made posting pictures quite difficult by forcing users to use hosting sites.

TBH, I think Practical Caravan has a bit of a nerve because they are using someone else's storage and bandwidth (Photobucket's) in the rendering their own web page. It is debatable of course, as you could also argue that it is for our (free) benefit, and they are our pictures, so we should arrange (and maybe pay) for the picture being there. As it is, a picture shown here has completely by-passed PC's own servers, costing PC no storage or bandwidth whatsoever, so I can see why PC do it that way.

Some other forums host pictures themselves but reduce bandwidth somewhat by only allowing registered members to see them.

 

[otherclive]

Received an email from Photobucket today informing me about the change to their 3rd party posting process. Will not be joining up. Need direct posting available from our pc/devices albeit with much reduced bandwidth.

 

[Mogwyth]

If you look at hosting companies such as Fast hosts, 1 to 1 and 123-reg, , they all offer unlimited bandwidth on packages starting as little as £6.0 per month. For the websites and forums I am responsible for, we rent a serer with 2tb of storage plus 2 x 120gb ssd drives and unlimited bandwidth for about £1000 pa.This hosts about 50 websites (all ours) many with extensive image libraries.

Most forum software does have the ability innately or via a plugin to restrict the image size, even 50kb will get a good enough size/quality image for most purposes.

The loss of images is as I said earlier the reason we actuality discourage linking to images,