Friday 10 November 2017

Latest on the Photobucket Issue

Morning All

So last night Photobucket advised me that my account and third party hosting privileges would be extended til the middle of next year (this was after I had manually downloaded every one of my 5000+ photos from the account) - as I wrote in my last post I doubted this was a coincidence

I subsequently wrote back to photobucket

ME:

Hi Moss

Am I able to extend my plan past Summer of next year please?





THEIR RESPONSE

Moss
Moss (Photobucket Support)
Nov 9, 12:50 PM MST
Hi

As long as you keep your recurring billing active your plan will automatically renew for another year of the Plus 20 plan.

Please let me know if you have any additional questions regarding this.

Thanks!

Moss@Photobucket Support
Have a question about something else? Our help site is packed with articles to get the help you need quickly. Click this link to access our help site - http://support.photobucket.com/home.


so in summary I was informed on Monday that the Plus 20 plan (20GB) would be defunct in 30 days and to maintain access and third part party hosting rights I had to switch to their new 200 Plan for $400/year

I asked them if there was any other option for hosting my blog photos at a lower price - no response within 24 hours.

I recovered all my photos from Photobucket one by one ( I have subsequently discovered the album download function is NOT working/Not available). Having done this Photobucket write to me and tell me that they acted in haste and it now appears that providing I renew my contract next year they will give me another years grace.

Net result I appear to have a lot more breathing room to make my decision


However the actions of Photobucket should be classified as wanton vandalism....millions of images have been disconnected from the worlds greatest library, years of research, stories and threads across hundreds of forums have been wiped out by a single button.

I count myself lucky that I have been able to recover my images and be afforded the time to think about my next steps. 


Moss

6 comments:

  1. I never use third party hosting for my images, I simply just upload them to blogspot

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Blogspot is third party hosting. Unless it's your domain and webspace it's third party hosting that can be pulled any time....

      Delete
  2. Glad to hear there's been a bit of back-tracking by Photobucket and you will still be able to use your pictures on there in your blog.

    ReplyDelete
  3. If it was me I‘d show them the bad finger and let the account expire.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Interesting......I have been debating the same issue. Recently went through and deleted all my mobile upload files(Backed up already) to get my account under the limit. I plan to go through and download all remaining pics and all blog posts that were linked to photobucket then delete my account.

    I have found using the upload from phone feature much easier than Photobucket and have been using it for recent blog posts.

    Not happy with Photobucket tactics at all.

    ReplyDelete
  5. From Anatolis Game room:
    The blog is saved!!!
    With help from one of my readers, a friend at work and a mindblowing online tool I managed to save my blog away from being killed by the new Photobucket terms.

    I registered a new host with one.com, also registering the domain "anatolisgameroom.com" for future use. Copied my entire Photobucket catalogue of 22.000+ pictures, uploaded it all in identical folders at one.com and used "Blogger Find & Replace" tool to swap the image links in over 1400 blog posts in just under 20 minutes!

    It is a huge sigh of relief. I was ready to abandon this altogether, even felt that purchasing my new camera was made pointless.

    I checked and it all looks like it is working, I don't think i lost anything major in terms of content. During testing of the swap procedure there were problems where picture links were swapped but thumbnails remained locked to photobucket. This was solved by running the tool again to cover both http and https links.

    The blog seems to load things slightly slower, but on the other hand - pictures are shown without resize (unless I uploaded them resized). This is because my photobucket was resizing pictures while the one.com host does show them in full size. Now you can enjoy a very large amount of posts with better pictures!

    I still can't believe I made it, I will take a day to process this and then start uploading new content using my new host.

    Thanks for the support!

    ReplyDelete