TravelTalkOnline Forums Travel and Vacation Forums British Virgin Islands Photobucket is doing us wrong!

Way to go Photobucket, you are losing a paying customer! I just looked at my account and they have already included new 3rd party photo sharing requirements, they are requiring anyone wanting to share to pay $400 a year. I haven't received an email regarding this from them, but I assume its only a matter of time. I also assume all of my trip reports will contain a huge X over the photos soon, DANGIT!!!!!!!!

Shouldn't that picture be a thumbs down?

We are lucky the free fun lasted this long. Nothing can be "free" forever in a sustainable business. PhotoBucket has over 15 Billion images stored. That comes at a cost. Many use the service for commercial purposes or profit from the service. I pay for my material storage sheds. I will or do pay for my data storage needs from Apple to Google.

That's my way to go smirk!!

As I stated in my own words, I have a paid subscription and they will be requiring me to purchase their largest storage option at 5 times the cost which I have no need for...

Stormjib, as Beerman said, he does pay for an account. They are simply not letting people link to images unless you sign up for the $400 a month plan.

It looks like smugmug might be the way to go.. Need to pay, but costs are a lot less and it looks like sharing is ok.. Here's some photos I just uploaded.. took me about 5-10 minutes start to finish..





You can even easily change the size





Find the iguana!

Thumbs up because he is in St Michaels on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. ALWAYS thumbs up in St Mikes! - Mark

Good eye Mate!

If you're making them publicly available anyway, just use Imgur?

It used to be a great site. Now nearly impossible to use.If they want to use or delete my pictures I don't care. But won't be using them anymore.

Just found this on a wood working site, so no big X......

haven't tried it yet but could you use google photos?

Wouldn't it be easier to change the way you add photos to the site? Just thinking.

Most run out of "free" space on Google Drive quickly.

https://www.google.com/drive/pricing/

You could always try to maintain several "free" accounts staying below the limit?

If you can stay under the free limit with Google to post on most forums you must follow a cumbersome process to get to a .jpg or other extension that will post.

What we gradually learning is the internet is not free and someone is always on the paying end.

Here hold all my stuff and let anyone who wants to see it have access 24/7 does cost someone something.

Use photo option here onTTOL ...really easy

What is the Photo option??

Maybe you can answer the question... Why all the UK flags flying? I went there five years ago and they were flying then but I didn't find out why.

St. Michaels is "the town that fooled the British".
See War of 1812.

If you want to be certain that your photos are always going to be there, and that the owner of the site they are stored on will never change the rules on you, then you have only one option... Buy your own domain, and host your pictures yourself.

Oh yeah. That costs money, too. DARN!

I have lots of pictures on Photobucket myself. I will find somewhere else to put them. Big deal.

Buying a DOMAIN is dirt cheap. The rest of it, maybe not so much.

I have all my photos stored on 2 separate hard drives and have about 2500 on photobucket. Starting to share some via onedrive. Photobucket, which I pay a yearly fee for an upgrade to escape the ads that slowed it way down, has been great for purposes such as TTOL, but I wont pay the 800% increase. The only big deal for me is that with a flip of a switch poof there goes all my many hours of work on these reports. Positive note...this has motivated me to start making my photo trip books. Other than a few that I've framed, my wife says it's a shame to keep them hidden away on the computer. Positive is how we live! However I was pretty negative yesterday when I found out about this!!

Actually, there's plenty of inexpensive options for hosting your own domain these days.

Yes hosting your own domain is not the problem at all. Cost on a monthly basis can even be under $5, maybe more realistic is between $5 and $10. Many have "unlimited storage" and "unlimited bandwidth" (take with a grain of salt, but for personal use it more than likely is correct, you do not even have to create a web page really).

The biggest issue (not really but more complicated) is that you will have to get photo software on your own computer to resize and reduce the photos before uploading. You cannot upload a 5mg photo and expect to share it really. Photobucket did this for you automatically, so you would have to do it yourself. The software is out there, and some of them will do large batches at a time.

Then the only other time problem is creating all of the folders/directories and actually uploading them to the servers.

If you put photos on a hard drive, use TWO hard drives. I lost two years of photos on a malfunctioning drive.
Or even use flash drives as a backup.

Better yet, just back up online. www.crashplan.com is what I'd recommend and have used for years. Had some failures and needed to restore as well. Works great and is reasonably priced.

Eric, even that isn't so difficult. Simple add on to a wordpress site would work. Not something most people want to get into though, but it is easy to do and not that costly. And in this case, the gallery is configured to resize it. Can't do as many things on the fly, but if someone did want to manage all their own photos and retain them on their own, something like wordpress with a photo gallery would work ok.

Thanks <img src="http://www.traveltalkonline.com/forums/images/graemlins/toast.gif" alt="" />

Beerman...have aways loved your trip reports and pictures, especially the SXM ones.

I too am losing all of my reports due to Photobucket change.

Was told Google Plus was the way to go, but I cannot figure out how to get a link to post on TTOL. You were so helpful to all in the past, I hope you've figured this issue out and can help.

Beachkitten thanks! I haven't looked real hard into new options yet, PB says I have until Dec 2018....so my feet might drag a bit! If I come up with something "easy" I will let you know.

p.s. SXM was a great time, we need to go back.

I went to doing a blogs for trip reports and then linking them to TTOL.
I had enough of Photobucket and all the adds and malware. I know blogspot allows you to link, but it is a google product also.