BIG Problem: Photobucket Just Broke Billions of Photos Across the Web

LeadCrow · May 21, 2018

Too little, too late. PhotoBucket's refusal to cave demonstrates alternatives are necessary, as well as removing such incumbant sites' ability to coerce their users into agreeing to unacceptable terms and pricing.

The fine folks at SmugMug purchased Flickr recently so I have hope it can dethrone PB. I suspect this made PB realize its latest stunt had no chance to last against an unshackled Flickr.

zappaDPJ · May 21, 2018

Photo who? The last two paragraphs says it all really.

It employed 120 people in downtown’s ballpark neighborhood at its height. Welch, its co-founder, returned to Photobucket at one point after it purchased his photo-sharing app company, but he since left the business.

Today Photobucket has 10 full-time employees and is based at a downtown co-working space.

Bye

cheat_master30 · May 21, 2018

Yeah, Photobucket's not exactly in a situation to make a comeback anytime soon. Nice they fixed the broken images, but unfortunately, a lot of trust has been lost none the less, and Imgur has basically eaten their lunch.

That said, the biggest lesson to learn here is very simple:

Do not use these free hosting sites for anything you want to keep around for the long run.

Buy hosting, upload them to the site you're sharing them on, do that sort of thing instead.

Wes of StarArmy · May 24, 2018

Now would be a good time to convert those working-again images into attachments with Metamirror or a similar add-on.

SkillGuy · May 27, 2018

Photobucket was one of my favorite when it comes to image hosting, but ever since they changed their terms of use, it becomes my dumped img hosting site. This really made me to lost lot of images because the price tag is too high.

jmtullock · Jun 27, 2018

Photobucket should've known that nobody will ever want to pay to have images hosted like that. It happened to imageshack and it's happening to imgur now too. I run an image host that serves about 3 million images a month and would absolutely kill to have the level of traffic and users that Photobucket and the others had in their prime.

bucket · Jun 28, 2018

what would you differently than them?

jmtullock · Jun 30, 2018

bucket said:
what would you differently than them?

Me? I would retain a simple layout that makes it fast and easy to upload images right from the main page, and I would never disable hotlinking. Imgur has blocked gamefaqs from hotlinking images. That's caused a lot of links to not work or embed properly, and as a result the users there have started using alternatives such as mine. Breaking such a fundamental feature of your website is bound to cause you to lose users.

bucket · Jun 30, 2018

not worried about losing money?

jmtullock · Jul 10, 2018

Disk space and bandwidth are becoming so cheap these days that it isn't even too expensive to do it. Going with a CDN like Amazon would obviously be expensive, but choosing an alternative like Cloudflare is peanuts. Even serving up billions of images would only be low four figures.

Dubbed Navigator · Oct 12, 2019

My forum runs very heavily from images, we took a huge hit from it which i'm still fixing today.
In reality they are no better than they were when they replaced images with the kitten. Blurring them out after a 25MB bandwidth limitation is just as bad.

LeadCrow · Oct 12, 2019

Chevereto is by far the best Photobucket alternative if you really needs photo storage and embedding on your own terms. Selfhosting your own service with savings and earnings from operating it made your own will give you a lot of flexibility.

Web services have since a while become really restrictive and agressive in their monetization attempts, so users should expect the most valuable portions of user experience chopped off to be resold back at a premium.

Dubbed Navigator · Oct 12, 2019

LeadCrow said:
Chevereto is by far the best Photobucket alternative if you really needs photo storage and embedding on your own terms. Selfhosting your own service with savings and earnings from operating it made your own will give you a lot of flexibility.

Web services have since a while become really restrictive and agressive in their monetization attempts, so users should expect the most valuable portions of user experience chopped off to be resold back at a premium.

I have gone for the option of downloading through hotlinks. Its a very long and tedious process, and in the long term I will need to think about DO spaces or something similar. Commercial companies and growth eh!

Leaf_Green · Oct 25, 2019

Years back I started encouraging my forum's members to use the forum's own storage to upload their images. I also backed up various images from past threads that were hosted by third-party providers.

Crisis averted because I knew this was coming. I rehosted many of these images and put them back in signatures, etc. Although it was a couple of years ago, I do feel bad for those who have been shafted by this. I would always strongly advise against using any free third-party. Even if it isn't cheap, keep those images internal in preparation for when this all happens again.

Dubbed Navigator · Oct 26, 2019

Leaf_Green said:
Years back I started encouraging my forum's members to use the forum's own storage to upload their images. I also backed up various images from past threads that were hosted by third-party providers.

Crisis averted because I knew this was coming. I rehosted many of these images and put them back in signatures, etc. Although it was a couple of years ago, I do feel bad for those who have been shafted by this. I would always strongly advise against using any free third-party. Even if it isn't cheap, keep those images internal in preparation for when this all happens again.

I've put a safeguard in so the vast majority are saved. Not having that again. Literally taken months to put it right, with tonnes of threads deleted

haqzore · Nov 5, 2019

jmtullock said:
Disk space and bandwidth are becoming so cheap these days that it isn't even too expensive to do it. Going with a CDN like Amazon would obviously be expensive, but choosing an alternative like Cloudflare is peanuts. Even serving up billions of images would only be low four figures.

I hesitate to think it's that simple.

It's easy to sit & theorize about how to do Photobucket's job better.
Just like it was easy for so many companies to theorize (then actually try) to do YouTube's job better.

Reality is more complex & expensive than many think.

Photobucket's/YouTube's/etc... costs aren't limited to simple storage & bandwidth. To think so is an incredibly short-sighted short-cut to failure.

BIG Problem: Photobucket Just Broke Billions of Photos Across the Web

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