Alternative to Photobucket

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
121

Rich, I suspect the infrastructure cost to run Photobucket is way more per user than the cost to run AOL for example (yes silly me still uses AOL).

At the same time, the income streams for Photobucket seem dramaticly more limited than those for AOL.

Photobucket provides a more expensive service, yet has less opertunities to “sell” something.

Personally, I don’t play games, or go on facebook, so free or not none of them put ads in front of me or make money on me.

Years ago in my career as an electrical project manager I helped build the internet. Most people have no idea the massive infrastructure of computer servers, and the electrical power infrastructure, needed to power the web.

One job we did required more than trippling the electrical service into an eight story downtown building so that one floor of the building could be an internet server hub - millions of dollars just for that one little hub in downtown Baltimore.

Best example of poor quality free crap on the internet - Yahoo, and all their “free” “groups”. In most every case, their software is so clunky, convoluted, full of ad catches and popups, I have complelely given up on every Yahoo group.

Daddy was right, in most cases you get exactly what you pay for…

Sheldon

PS - one more point - in 1/10 of the time it would take me to relocate and relink the 400 images I have on Photobucket to some other provider, I can earn the money Photobucket charges. For some people “playing” with a computer is a hobby, for me it is just a tool, the faster, easier and simpler it does what I want the better.

122

Advertising is advertising, be it print media, radio or television or whatever. People are influenced by what they read, hear, or see. Don’t kid yourself that Photobucket doesn’t somehow doesn’t generate enough advertising revenue to stay afloat.

Something else has to be behind Photobucket’s decision to cut loose all us little guys, for it is not so stupid as to believe that everyone will stick around and pay $400 per year when the same thing can be had free elsewhere. For whatever the reason, it already assumes that all us littl guys will leave. Photobucket wants to jettison all us little guys. It’s a business decision of some kind.

Rich

123

OK

124

You have to “Create an Album” and choose the option “Private (anyone with the link)”.

125

Say what???

C’mon, Sheldon, you have never given up that easy.

Fight back. Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeze. [(-D]

Rich

126

Wayne,
Thoughts:

The sense of defeat/loss/anger over the time spent creating threads to help others and having them trashed by this new policy. It definitely takes time to create threads and if the idea is to help others and provide a service to the community, this is a kick in the teeth to that ideal. Letting go of that may take some time. The real cost here is the time it takes to create links…PB is making a play to try and capitalize on that.

Perhaps forums such as MR should start allowing photo uploads to protect the content of forum threads moving forward. MRH already does this. I’m not sure if MR views forum content as valuable enough to support it in this way and one could make the argument that spending $$$ on server space for content that they don’t review or otherwise exert editorial control over may not be in their best interest.

It is possible to pay for unlimited bandwidth hosting packages for what PB was charging for their ad free membership (or even less than that). They are a bit more difficult to use but definitely workable. By hosting your own material at your own site, you don’t guarantee that something like this won’t happen again but you do keep it more in your control – until your ISP charges more or changes its TOS…

127

I have no horse in this race since I do not post pictures here or on other sites. But I will say that it is unfortunate that some older (and not so old) postings that had excellent and instructive photos now are very incomplete because of issues with the original photo hosting. For those who do like to post photos and are looking for a new photo hosting site, give a thought to the stability and probable longevity of that site.

Dave Nelson

128

Checked through the options and went with Imgur. My signature’s back![:D]

129

In the Diner (last day or two of June), I asked Steven why Kalmbach prefers us to use a host for photos instead of allowing us to post the photos directly into the forum from our computers.

I hope Steven does not mind if I quote him . The reasons make sense to me, and I appreciate Kalmbach for providing this forum.

Steven explained: “Two reasons. First of all, we don’t make any money off the Forums, so we don’t want to have to buy a bunch of servers to host the photos on. Photos take up a lot more MB than plain text. Look back over the years this Forum has been around and you can imagine how much space this Forum would take if we hosted photos. Secondly, we don’t want to be liable for whatever photos someone might want to post here: copyrighted material, inappropriate material, whatever. We don’t have the staff time to police it all, so we’d rather it all be hosted elsewhere.”

130

Hi, Mel

I went through very similar experiences with Google (I was a former Picasa user), Amazon, DropBox and Flickr as well.

One thing I’ll point out is that these services are geared more toward a “Cloud-based” photo backup utility rather than simply being a 3rd party sharing host.

That’s why the app was looking for EVERY photo from your hard drive. You should be able to select which folders to automatically upload from. Also, once uploaded you can then select which photos (or none) that are available for public display.

I have 33,000 photos on Flickr but only a handful are available for public viewing unless I send a specific link with permission.

With Photobucket I uploaded very small versions (highly compressed and re-sized) of photos that I want to include in forums. These are in no way “back-ups” of my original photos which I keep on the main hard drive, and a secondary hard drive AND several of the “Cloud” based storage sites. I want to be able to retrieve my original, high resolution photo if needed.

Let me try a test with a photo linked to Google:

No joy here: this just links to a “New Shared Album” at PhotoGoogle.

Try again soon…

Regards, Ed

** as of today, 2 July, I have not yet received any emails of notifications from Photobucket and as far as I can see, I still hav

131

Fllickr

I just now opened a Flickr account, and I have uploaded one photo.

I want to experiment and post it here. What is my next step?. Where is the code to copy into this forum ?

Thanks

132

Hi, Garry

I’m fumbling along like everyone else here. Maybe others have better methods but this seems to work for me.

When your photo is “selected” click the curving arrow at the lower right.

A dialog box opens, mine allows re-sizing of the image, too.

IMG_8545_fix by Edmund, on Flickr

You want to delete all the text before and after the

OK… Well, scrap THAT idea!

In another thread someone mentioned that everything prior to http and after .img had to be deleted?

So here I am trying to post an example of the link but the photo appears anyway by using the entire link [banghead]

BACK to your original question… just click on the curving arrow icon and choose BBCode as your sharing option. Then choose the size of the photo (I chose medium 800 x 570) then use CTRL+C to copy the already highlighted link.

Paste this (Ctrl+V)into the MR forum dialog and that should do it. IF you try to paste it into the forum photo dialog box it will not work unless you DO delete the text before http and after .img.

Good Luck, Ed

133

[quote user=“richhotrain”]

NYBW-John

hon30critter

So I guess if we close our Photobucket accounts all our pictures will disappear from our previous posts. Do I have that right?

I’m also guessing that the only way to restore those photos to the threads would be to go back through the picture files on my computer, find the same photo, copy it to another photo hosting site, and then re-post the photo in the original thread. Correct?

That’s a bummer!

To me, this is a breach of business ethics of the highest order!

Dave

I see nothing unethical about what they are doing. They are making a business decision. We as consumers have the right to accept their new terms or look elsewhere for similar services. Time will tell if they made a wise business decision. Generally speaking, when you start charging a consumer for a service that they had been getting for free, it doesn’t work out well.

No, it is not ethical. Dave is correct. It is a breach of business ethics of the highest order.

No notice in advance. In many cases, including my own, no notice after the fact.

What Photobucket has done is to hold its members hostage for ransom, pure and simple.

Whatever business decision it is that they are making, it is not apparent to me. In exchange for free storage, members were subject to viewing ads. Advertisers paid Photobucket to pst their ads. That was Photobucket’s s

134

I’ll try this. I’m experimenting with recent photo of waterfall.

Hmmmm … back to drawing board.

I did the curved arrow that said “share” and copied the code I saw.

135

Ed

After about 5 hours at the Google Photo learning curve I think I’ve got it.&nbs

136

Thanks, Mel

I may play around with GooglePhoto a little more. I’m also trying to get a Blog-type page going at Wordpress. I signed up over a year ago, paid for a “premium” account but still have a long way to go to get anything “Web Worthy” there!

I see why people and businesses have dedicated web designers hired out!

I was paying the $30/yr for the Photobucket Plus-20 plan. I wouldn’t even have minded if they wanted to raise the fee a little but their recent outages were becoming a real bother. I suppose the imgur and other free sites are OK but I see lots of down-side to that route, too.

Hopefully this will all get straightened out over the next few weeks and things can get back to normal… whatever “normal” might be [:-^]

Take care… Ed

137

Oh NO!

I just realized that Tom Kat 13’s “Yes! More Signs” Pages are now all KAPUT!

http://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/11/t/162879.aspx?page=31#2959188

ALL 31 pages[:(!]

And I was getting ready to search for a few building signs that I remember seeing there!

Major Bummer!!!

Ed

138

Yes that most definitely…sucks. That guy went through a lot of time and trouble to share those with others…and now nothing. No words to describe My feelings about what PB’s business decisions are…but it appears to be purely cut-throat, with no regard for others…Sad!

Take Care! [:D]

Frank

139

Hi John:

What would you say if your electrical bill suddenly went up by 13.3x and if you didn’t pay it your power would be cut off? Would that be ethical too?

I currently pay PB about $30.00 a year and things have been fine. That plan no longer appears in their offerings so I suspect that as soon as my plan expires I’m going to get told to pay the $400.00 per year. That is a 13 fold increase. If so, that will not be an ethical decision in any way, shape or form. That will be highway robbery. Just because they can do it doesn’t make it ethical.

In addition to the price hike, they apparently don’t give a hoot about the fact that they are negating the work of thousands of people. Is that ethical too?!? If you think so, check your dictionary for the meaning of the word.

ethical

[eth-i-k

140

There are two threads currently on this topic, and after reading them I’m wondering if a more reliable long term solution would be to set up your own blog. A couple of people have mentioned doing that and they are apparently not subject to the whims of Photo Bucket. I guess you would be dependent on the blog service provider though so ultimately it may not be a better solution.

I’m a dinosaur when it comes to this stuff. Maybe somebody can fill us in.

Dave