'Lost' photobucket images now visible again on PF

[GrahamB]

See here

Thanks to David Piraten on Playclicks/Playforos and VicKlicktor for posting the information here on PF.

This needs a new topic of its own.

If you are looking at older posts here on PF where the pictures have disappeared because Photobucket no longer provides free third party hosting, you may be able to reveal them once again.

Simply do this:
1. Click on the 'quote' button at the right hand end of the first line of the message containing 'banned' pictures

2. Look through the text of the message until you find a reference to a photobucket picture, something like [.img]http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a621/GrahamB2013/IMG_5000a_zpsofuagpnp.jpg[/img.] (I put a dot in the first and last brackets to stop the Simple Machines software showing the picture and not the text)

3.After each .jpg file extension enter ~original (not in bold)
[.img]http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a621/GrahamB2013/IMG_5000a_zpsofuagpnp.jpg~original[/img.]

4. Preview the message. The picture should appear. So you can admire the picture, repost it, save it to your hard-drive, screenshoot it, whatever!

Please let us know if this works every time, or only on more recent files.

[Raven]

That is great information, very useful for reading posts containing disappeared PhotoBucket pictures.

I tried it on a post from 2008, though, and it didn't work - but then it occurred to me that maybe those photos had  been removed from PB (or the PB account closed) since then, anyway.  To be sure whether or not this works for very old posts, you'd have to be sure that the photos were still hosted there.

I can only be 100% certain about my own photos.  But I've only been a member here since February 2014 - the photo in my first post shows in a quote:

- but I can't reliably check back any further than that.

[GrahamB]

Thanks for that, Raven. You are right of course, pictures missing from PB will not reappear. But I do like reading older posts and this 'trick' should make the picture loss less frustrating.

I wonder (question for Sylvia I suppose) if there is any way of actually editing older posts to revitalise the pictures. I would be prepared to do this (working through systematically) if given the necessary access. I know this forum is not an archive (one of the features of many online facilities is their ephemerality), but I do think it would be good to be able to search and revisit some of the wonderful work displayed on here in the past (especially your photo-stories, Raven!).

[VicKlicktor]

As most of you realized, Photobucket offered a free third party image hosting with a watermark for a while. Recently, that feature is not longer available. So, old Photobucket images are not visible in forums anymore. However, the solution explained in this thread is still valid.

It seems Photobucket decreased its crazy prices and they offer now a low cost subscription. Just in case any of you is interested and can share information later...