Photobucket Fix & Alternatives...

[alwaysFlOoReD]

alwaysFLOoReD, I just set up a Flickr account using my old yahoo account. It does allow 3rd party hosting and is 1000gb free storage. Seems like the way to go for now.

Z

Noted, thanks for the input.

OK...I have a question...that may sound dumb for someone with a tech background...but I know very little about the www other than basically how it works in a topological sort of way...

TRS has offered storage for a limited amount of images that we can upload and I have uploaded quite a few over the years...and they seem to be still on here.

Where are they stored and what are the chances that this could be enhanced?

I know with the Premium Membership we were allowed more uploads than the regular membership but I never bothered to look into it more than that because I thought having an off site host would ease the burden on the server...

so...what would this actually cost to expand and if we all became Premium Members would that help with the costs enough to carry it?

I will talk to Jim and find out what I can. This is something I think a lot of website are going to be looking at. I ran across a post elsewhere that mentioned Amazon Web Services and that the poster had two different websites that never went over the limit on the AWS free tier. I'm going to look at that for my own personal website/server. I dislike using giant corporations' services but I also don't think they will hold a customer property for ransom. There are other services that can do the same website/server idea and I will check into that as well.

 

[black_demon69]

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1HrUg6wMPLd58S7yjw44lcNTuTwT6MF0qWQ


it appears all i can do with my google drive is to share a link to pic..


PS this was a test

 

[Mark_88]

I will talk to Jim and find out what I can. This is something I think a lot of website are going to be looking at. I ran across a post elsewhere that mentioned Amazon Web Services and that the poster had two different websites that never went over the limit on the AWS free tier. I'm going to look at that for my own personal website/server. I dislike using giant corporations' services but I also don't think they will hold a customer property for ransom. There are other services that can do the same website/server idea and I will check into that as well.

Thanks for the effort Richard...it would be nice if we could have something readily available. I know there was a restriction on the size of the images we could upload to TRS so maybe a bit of image trimming would be needed by everyone to do it that way.

I know I can scale the image size right on my camera but I often forget to go into the settings before getting click happy.

 

[alwaysFlOoReD]

First post updated.

I'm looking at Amazon web services. There a lot to go thru. I'll let you know later.

 

[JoshT]

I unfortunately have been paying for PB bottom line subscription for about $30 a year for several years. At the time the free accounts not only had a storage limit but also had a limit on image size and links to pictures would change occasionally. It was worth it to me to be able to store the full sized photos and for my links to not break on a regular basis. Well looks like that's another subscription they are about to loose.

Don't know where I am going to turn to, but seriously considering setting up a server and hosting them myself. I've already been wanting to have my own server and have been planning to upgrade to a faster internet connection for years, but kept procrastinating. My ISP has been getting kinda ridiculous lately on connection and bandwidth issues, so the time may have come to put words into action.

Unfortunately I have a lot of pictures stored on PB that are no longer on my computer. Started trying to download them last night using their download album option. Sell started opening some of them this morning to find that over 50% of them are distorted to the point of being unrecognizable in Windows Photo Viewer. Seems that the metadata is somehow getting messed up while on their servers, so the photo resolution is way off. Photos can still be opened and viewed in MS Paint (and I would assume other image viewers) with no distortion. Now sure how this distortion would show in different applications like the various browsers. It can be fixed, but the only way I've found thus far is each image has to be manually saved into a different format (IE: PNG), then that new image opened and resaved back to original format.

 

[alwaysFlOoReD]

Don't know where I am going to turn to, but seriously considering setting up a server and hosting them myself. I've already been wanting to have my own server and have been planning to upgrade to a faster internet connection for years, but kept procrastinating. My ISP has been getting kinda ridiculous lately on connection and bandwidth issues, so the time may have come to put words into action.

Post up how you do it. Also wouldn't your home server still have to go thru the ISP? Or do you just pay them more?

 

[RayInStl]

Post up how you do it. Also wouldn't your home server still have to go thru the ISP? Or do you just pay them more?

Yes, it would still go through your ISP and most residential plans strictly prohibit serving content from your home. You would have to purchase a business account and those are a lot more pricey. While you're at it, it'd be best to purchase a static IP address, otherwise every time your modem is reset or your ISP timed out your connection, you would have to go to your domain registrar and update your IP in their settings.

Web hosting is not particularly expensive. $4/mo will get you 50GB of storage or more. And it's yours to do with as you please. But that's shared hosting, so if you use too much bandwidth they can say something.

 

[JoshT]

Upgrade to faster service as in get rid of ATT dsl that was only thing available when I moved here and get service from the ISP that that recently ran a cable backbone down my road. Anything would be better than the DSL, except for dialup or satellite.

Yes, I'd still have to go through an ISP, but it will probably be better than what I have now. As for the server, I don't know squat about that yet. One step at a time. First rescue stuff from PB, get better ISP, get busy on truck, then build a new desktop, though not necessarily in that order. Last thing will be the server if it happens.

 

[RayInStl]

Interesting. I just checked my Bronco II thread and my pics are still up. I guess they didn't hit every account at once. Probably won't be long.

Hosting just your own pictures with your residential ISP account is not likely to raise any red flags, unless you're just *that* popular. lol. But it wouldn't be a solution if TRS was looking for ways to host everyone's pictures. They would have to have a business account. The amount of bandwidth all the pictures would take would have the ISP getting pissed pretty fast.

Hosting your own website/pictures from a windows computer is super hard but would take some understanding of network terminology. There are tutorials for this online. The trickiest part would be setting up port forwarding on your modem/router to let the traffic through, and you'd either have to refer to your "site" by IP address or get a domain name (free or cheap) and point it at your IP.

Either way, that's outside of the scope of this particular problem for most of us here. I plan to use my web hosting account from now on, since I already have it for my website.

 

[85_Ranger4x4]

I think it is a volume based thing. If you have a ton of linked pics you are getting picked on. There is a limit you can get away with for third party hosting.

 

[97RangerXLT]

I just saw this on another car site...

I don't use photobucket, but it is definitely a dick move on their part. I think that a possibility is that they are the "fall guy" photo site, and now that they started the ball rolling, other free hosting sites will follow along.

I would think that Jim hosting photos would be fairly expensive, especially if those images are linked to in other forums etc..

But for less than 100 bucks a year and some tech savvy of your own, you can get your own domain name and make your own site for hosting stuff. make you own website, have fun, and host all of your own pics and not worry about whether or not the free hosts will suddenly charge you.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2427219,00.asp here is a list of less than 8 bucks a month webhosting services that are out there. I used 1&1 several years back, and they are pretty decent.

AJ

 

[hoosier1104]

Since I take a lot of photos with my phone, I just tapacrap aka tapatalk.

This is a test from my Google Drive account:

Test results: No Bueno

 

[85_Ranger4x4]

Any tips on how to download your albums from PB? I try, do the captcha thing, hit "download" and it does nothing.

I was planning on moving some of the albums I have from vacations and stuff that really don't mean anything if they are linked and seeing if I could get my tech stuff to work again.

FWIW Flickr says I have 1tb of room. Dunno about linking yet but it will make great storage for now if nothing else.

Also, if you have a free moment they are getting tons of feedback on their facebook page...

 

[Mark_88]

Yes, I saw some of that too...not going over very well with some people.

I kept copies of all the images I put on PB so I don't really care if they disappear.

Keep in mind that they will only charge you if you want to have more storage and link to other sites. I don't agree with the changes but I also appreciate that the storage has been free for a long time and I took advantage of the services their site offered.

I'm just wondering if this will be a class action item because there must be millions of people that did the same and took advantage of their hosting...


If it was less expensive and I was working I might even be willing to pay for the privilege of linking...most of the images I linked are long buried and if someone does find them and they want to see them I can always send them along...l

I would like to see this resolved though because there are a lot of people that linked images to some good documents and it would be catastrophic for some documents to not have those images...

 

[alwaysFlOoReD]

Updated with new web hosts.