A bunch of pics may be about to get broken

Photobucket is changing their terms, now in order to display pics stored there on third party sites (like this one), users will have to pay $399 a year. Save your pics, everyone!

Try tinypic.

Or Google photos. Free unlimited storage for pics that are not super high quality.

Yes, I expect they're about to see a mass exodus, if they haven't already.

This makes perfect sense now! I keep seeing areas where a pic should be that says "Please Update Your Account to Enable 3rd Party Hosting". I wondered what they were up to. I can't imagine they're going to keep many customers with a $399 annual fee.

Where have you been seeing that, KristaY ? Have you seen it here on SMF? I haven't seen it yet.

I still have not received that notice from them myself, so not sure what I'll do if and when it happens. It's a bummer for sure, because there is no way I intend to pay a $400 annual fee for that.

kchaystack said:

Or Google photos. Free unlimited storage for pics that are not super high quality.

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The problem with Google photos is that you can't directly embed them on third party sites. You can link to them, but the image won't show up directly in the thread.

lsg said:

Try tinypic.

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Tinypic is owned by Photobucket. I don't think I'd be willing to depend on it for image hosting.

earlene said:

Where have you been seeing that, KristaY? Have you seen it here on SMF? I haven't seen it yet.

I still have not received that notice from them myself, so not sure what I'll do if and when it happens. It's a bummer for sure, because there is no way I intend to pay a $400 annual fee for that.

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I saw it here just a bit ago earlene! I don't have a photobucket account so maybe that's part of the problem for me. Most recently I saw it here, post #21 by SunRiseArts:

http://www.soapmakingforum.com/showthread.php?t=64104&page=3

Kittish said:

The problem with Google photos is that you can't directly embed them on third party sites. You can link to them, but the image won't show up directly in the thread.

Click to expand...

The only way I worked out you can do it is to download them first then upload them to the site. There is probably a more efficient way but I don't know it.

I think I've come across a lovely solution for people on this forum, anyway. Especially if you're ok with paying $20 a year. Become a supporter here, and upload your soap pics to the photo gallery. Super easy to direct link to the pics in threads. (Technically you don't have to be a supporter to upload to the photo gallery and link to it, but storage costs money.)

Flickr doesn't charge and is owned/linked to yahoo. I find it very difficult to embed pics hike on my tablet but it is easy on a computer.

KristaY said:

I saw it here just a bit ago earlene! I don't have a photobucket account so maybe that's part of the problem for me. Most recently I saw it here, post #21 by SunRiseArts:

http://www.soapmakingforum.com/showthread.php?t=64104&page=3

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Yes, now I am also seeing it this morning, including in one of my own recent posts. What a bummer. And none of us can edit our own posts to correct photo links should we so desire. Lots of those images are going to be all over the threads with no recourse it looks like.

Major photo linking disaster for the old threads, I think. At least for those of us who believed we were saving SMF much needed bandwidth by not using the SMF attachments feature. Guess I'll have to be changing my perspective on that.

And to make matters worse!!! The photos in my Photobucket account that have links connected to them, are no longer viewable even my me in my own Photobucket account except as thumbnails. I consider this highway robbery on the part of PB. It will take me hours and hours and hours and probably weeks and weeks and weeks and possibly months to deal with the fallout. I probably never will be able to correct all the broken links going back to 2008 when I first started using Photobucket!

I went ahead and deleted my Photobucket account, because the ONLY reason I even had it was because I could link images from there. Now that isn`t happening anymore, no use of keeping it. I don`t need photobucket for storing pictures when I can use my 1 TB backup storage for everything...

Besides, whenever I logged in it took me foreeeeverrrrr to load the site because of all the adds they have in there, it is crazy! If I used an ad-blocker to get around that the site didn`t work, it did`nt load, respond, upload or do anything. As soon as I disabled the ad-blocker everything was as normal.

I use tinypic and its been really great. If by the off chance it becomes a problem, I will move imgur. Most of the members on another site I visit are switching to imgur and they really like it.

Obsidian said:

I use tinypic and its been really great. If by the off chance it becomes a problem, I will move imgur. Most of the members on another site I visit are switching to imgur and they really like it.

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Tinypic is owned by Photobucket, so I`ll steer away from that as I have had enough of them.

But I`ll check out imgur, thanks! : D

Well, I do have an imgur account, and it's still accessible. I haven't used it in several years so I'll have to start using it again and familiarize myself with how it works again. Thanks for the reminder, Obsidian. I wasn't even sure I'd still be able to get in, but no problem.

Edit to test placing an image from imgur. It took several tries, but I finally got it. Need to use the direct link