I am not a lawyer and I don´t recall all of the small print when I signed up for my PB account, but what I am aware of is that with my signing up, I agreed to the terms and conditions of PB, which included 3rd party hosting free of charge. Now PB has changed that, which constitutes a breach of contract to my disadvantage - at least for pictures uploaded and hosted prior to the date of changing the terms and conditions.
PB´s business conduct is at minimum unethical, maybe also illegal!
Yahoo is known for making bad business decisions. They are now owned by Verizon. I’ve been a Verizon customer forever and they have terrible customer service. It’s not a combination of traits that will customers enjoy.
If 90% of people leave PB but 10% are willing to pay, they will double or triple their revenues and can cut back on the infrastructure that supports all that storage. I think it’s more likely that they have over estimated people’s willingness to pay and will lose money on the price hike.
Ethics? I don’t want to get the thread locked, so I won’t mention any examples but i think we left ethics behind in the last century.
Dave,
I have a fairly large memory on My PC…I only had 480 pic’s with PB and it only took Me less than 5minutes to download My entire album to My hard drive to a zip folder. All my pic’s remain on My hard drive until I delete them. I can put them on any free hosting site that I want. If the free hosting site goes belly up and the pic’s there are no longer accessible…I still have them on My hard drive. I choose to give IMGUR a shot and found that it is, (to Me, anyway) one of the easiest to use. All I do is go to My image folder click on a pic,’ I use direct, click on it and it copys…go to the MR site click on the icon with the picture, insert My img…press ok and the pic shows up immediately…I can still type anything I want after the img…just click enter first.
I have shared a couple pic’s to their community photo sharing and have already recieved quite a few comments and questions about the pic’s…as far as where I got the models from and what scale they are etc. I found that interesting, because it appears there are some modeler’s on that site, that would appreciate help in finding things that they didn’t know exsisted as far as modeling is concerned. One of the pic’s was My tug boat.
Btw…I had a little longer time trying to delete My account with PB…almost as though they wouldn’t let Me leave…LOL I also was a paid user…but just got tired of them and their ways.
Take Care! [:D]
Frank
Hi Frank:
I’ve got everything saved on my hard drive too, and I use Norton to backup my files which it does daily I believe (I said I was a dinosaur!). I also copy my pictures and my important files like my layout plan onto CDs as well.
I think what really has me disappointed with this whole PB fiasco is that almost all of our old posts with pictures in them will be rendered next to useless. I’m debating how much work I want to do to go back through my old posts, figure out which photos are missing, and then replace them from a new photo hosting site. That will get old really fast!
One way to get around this might be to have forum members ask to have specific photos re-posted by posting a request in the original thread and also via a PM so the original poster will be sure to see the request. At least by doing that we would only need to repost those pictures that are requested. Maybe Steven could add a sticky to the General Discussion forum suggesting something like that.
By the way, what the heck is going to happen to the MR Photo Galleries?
Dave
Hi Henry:
Unfortunately I think that the human condition has always given rise to unethical behaviour. I still choose to hope however that there are others out there like me who place a high value on ethical behaviour. In fact I think we are the silent majority, and that’s the whole problem!
Sorry Steven if I’m over the line.
Dave
Hi, Dave
As near as I can tell, the Kalmbach Photo Galleries images are stored on THEIR servers. If you click on submit a photo it takes you through an upload process.
http://cs.trains.com/p/help.aspx#media
I have not done it personally but I may give it a go here soon…
Ed
Ethics aside, I can’t help wondering why Photobucket did this so suddenly and unexpectedly. There was no advanced notice on the web site. The change was immediate. I never did get any notice whatsoever, no email, no pop up notice on the web site. My account simply stopped working. Were it not for a comment by Ulrich in the Diner, I would still be unaware of any change until these Photobucket threads started appearing in the forum.
Rich
Rich,
I don’t know if You caught My post in another thread, but I had said that I got My msg. in spam. I believe You should have got Yours there too. I believe You have G-Mail…No I’m thinking of someone else…Not You.[:S]
Take Care! [:D]
Frank
I went with the freebee Google Blogger, my daughter had been using it for several years without any problems. She also helped me get it up and running, her help was a necessary thing because a blog wasn’t in my repertoire.
I’m into my 11th year of my blog without any major problems. About 6 years ago a Google upgrade or update dinged about a dozen pictures (120+ posts). So other than minor learning curves after a Google upgrade ever couple of years everything has run very good. Its simple to upload from my blog, right click on the picture and “copy image location” (Firefox) then paste to the Forum.
I don’t think Google will pull a Photo Bucket act on its users, they continue offering more and more freebees to their Internet users.
My only problem with Google is help is hard to come by from Google if you need it. A quick email to my daughter and I’m back in business.
Nothing in email folder. Nothing in Spam folder.
Rich
I know some on here don’t like Facebook, but it is free and I find it easy to use.
I hope this picture comes through.
The only trouble I have had with PB is stomping out adds. It’s like the old game where you whack the goffer.
One picture
Cheers
Lee
[quote user=“hon30critter”]
NYBW-John
I see nothing unethical about what they are doing. They are making a business decision.
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.
Robert … It is not FaceBook that is the trouble. It is PhotoBucket. PhotoBucket apparently, is trying to obtain a form of ransom from members with large amoiunts of photos saved in their accounts. … It is extortion.
I wonder what percent of PhotoBucket users are allowing themselves to be victims of extortion and actually paying the excessive fees.
Who uses Flickr? … I’m experimenting with it, and I can’t get it to psot a photo into the forum.
Good question, Garry. My guess is that most will decline to pay a fee and will move their photos elsewhere.
Rich
Given the excellent point of the importance to sustaining the usefulness of prior threads (which I often find useful) I’d be amenable to a modest fee if the site worked well. For me that would be within $10 per month. If that were offered (then or now) by PB, however, I would still not do it. First, their free site useability, for me, in the last 6 months went to nearly unuseable. Not poor, but awful. Second, they have burned their bridge with me permanently when they behave with (free or paying) users / customers as described in current threads. So I don’t plan to do future “business” with them. I’m chalking PB up to experience.
Now I’m focused on imgur vs. imgbb, just for my trains photos posting. From what I see imgur has been around awhile, which I like. I can’t find much info on imgbb so I’m a little more cautious about going that direction. So the utility of one versus the other is one aspect, but I wonder if other issues like (I’m speculating here) being bug / virus free, long term viability should be considered. I do weight minimal learning curve as a key for me. And apparently I’ve decided what my “fee” tolerance (if necessary) is.
Don’t delete your photos off of Photo Bucket. Leave them be and just upload your new photos to another site. I always knew PB was a bad idea for 3rd party sharing because before Facebook there was My Space. My Space was full of the over the limit message that you get when too many people see your image. You have no control over how many people see your images, it depends on how popular the threads you post them on are. Also the larger the file size the quicker you reach your limit. Leave your PB images up there for posterity. When the treads they are one become less popular and your new images are somewhere else your old posts will still be good.
As for Facebook: They track every single webpage you go to unless you remember to sign out. Then their adds are specifically targeted to you based on the pages you viewed. If you go to home depots’ website Facebook knows exactly which items you looked at. Any page with the little share on Facebook icon lets them know you were there.
In case nobody told you: Nothing is free except kittens.
There is no point to leaving your images on PB if you don’t intend to pay the fee because your images have been replaced everywhere you posted them with a message from PB that reads, “Please update your account to enable 3rd party hosting”.
Rich
I’m trying to post from Flickr…
I don’t want a square with a question mark in it. How am I supposed to do this ?
Hmmmm … I actually got it showing … I’m not sure why the etra stuff is showing however.
Edit again … Now it is gone. ?
Suggestion … to anyone who has successfully posted photos in the MR Forum using Flickr or one of the others. (I am trying to use Flickr, but I have not found the right combination yet.)
Please explain how to do it, step by step…
A big thank you if anyone does that.