Photobucket stops third party hosting

[Overlord]

...unless you give them 400 USD a year. I'll need to fix my old posts...

[Bimat]

This is crazy. I will too have to fix my posts now. Images have disappeared already!

Aditya

[eurocoin]

When will they stop third party hosting, and where can I find more information on this?

[Bimat]

They have already stopped it. All my images are gone! I got a mail from saying so on Wednesday (or Tuesday) and it was implemented with immediate effect.

Aditya

[eurocoin]

They have already stopped it. All my images are gone! I got a mail from saying so on Wednesday (or Tuesday) and it was implemented with immediate effect.

Aditya

I have not received an email, and all of my images that I have on Photobucket still appear on the forum.

[<k>]

Mine too:

http://www.worldofcoins.eu/forum/index.php/topic,15809.0.html

Fortunately I have saved most of my web pages, so I will resurrect the big topics first. Over the past couple of years or so, I stopped using images hosts, as the image size here has become sufficient.

[eurocoin]

They have changed their Terms of Service and it is now prohibited to use 3rd party hosting if you have a free account. Apparently they have a system which detects 3rd party hosting. There now also is a bandwith limit for people who link to photobucket, so that too can cause that images disappear. They then change all of the images in "You need to pay"-crap. Anyway I will be moving everything to Flickr, which I am sure will also soon start to charge for third party hosting.

Disaster.

[capnbirdseye]

I'm glad all my images are safe on the WoC server, in the first months of joining WoC I used Tinypic but those images eventually disappeared without notice 

[asm]

Fortunately, I forgot my passwords for Photobucket twice and had since stopped using it. However, a lot of old images may be lost and I lost many images when my computer had crashed some years back..............

I currently use the Office Picture Manager from Microsoft which permits size reduction of images without loosing a lot on image size.

Amit

[Bimat]

I'm fine with Photobucket's decision as a matter of their policy, but they should have informed us earlier with some notice period. Implementing the decision immediately is ridiculous!

Aditya

[malj1]

I have replaced two images so far but it is almost impossible to upload files today as maybe others are trying too. It has taken about 15minutes for each image so I shall try another day. Fortunately I only have a handful on Photobucket as they upset me years ago with a previous change!

My photobucket ones haven't fallen off yet! see here for instance.

I have others using my own Google sites images these too will fall off later this year.

[Overlord]

I'm fine with Photobucket's decision as a matter of their policy, but they should have informed us earlier with some notice period. Implementing the decision immediately is ridiculous!

Aditya

Exactly. If the decision/change in TOS was communicated well in advance, with the option to purchase a reasonably priced upgrade, I may have considered paying. The current communication has the tone of a ransom note that'll result in most people not paying them a red cent.

[malj1]

Imageshack did exactly the same thing two or three years ago with only paid accounts now permitted. Dropbox did the same a couple of months ago.

Google+ may be a good option? I have used this for several years now.  ...although Google have dropped their google sites which is ending in November and being replaced with a fairly useless New Google sites.

Picasa can be used to edit and upload to Google+ but this too is finished as far as updating is concerned but it can still be used and downloaded.

[Bimat]

Whatever images I have uploaded on WoC through Photobucket, I have a back-up of those on my PC (or at least, majority of them). However, it's almost impossible to find each and every topic with embedded image(s) and update it to show the correct scans. So I guess many of those topics are now practically dead.

Aditya

[<k>]

I will repair my affected topics, tho it will take me some weeks. No topic is 100% affected - I rarely used a host for all the images in a topic. My very long topics will take the most time to repair. I'll concentrate on my "Decimal Coins of the Sterling Area" series first.

I did repair my various African "country" topics today, but the African statesmen portraits topic is very long, and it will have to wait some weeks before I tackle it.