Photobucket no longer offers free Third Party Image Hosting

[GrahamB]

A disaster has occurred! Especially for anyone who likes to use the old posts on this site for reference.

You will have noticed that many photos are no longer appearing on PF. This is because Photobucket (a very popular image hosting site often recommended by users here) has stopped the free use of their site for Third Party Hosting of images (upload photo to their site, post a link here on PF). I luckily upgraded to a paid account recently (to improve uploading efficiency), so all photos I posted are still appearing. I think if you upgrade to a paid Photobucket account now, all previous links will be restored. But moving to another hosting site will not do this (there is no way of editing those old posts to put in new links, even if you wanted to).

So if you want to post pictures here from now on, you can
1. Upgrade to a paid Photobucket account
2. Use attachments
3. Use another image hosting site- there are some free ones.

See here and here for more on this.

I wonder if there is any other workaround, especially for older images (especially from people no longer active on PF)?

[playmofire]

As you may have seen, Graham, some of my threads have been hit by this.

I was already thinking of leaving photobucket as it really is a rubbish site in its free version (not much better I hear as the paid version) with all the ads and being very slow.  I definitely will be now, as soon as I've managed to download the albums I want to reuse, something which took ages yesterday as, I guess, lots of other people are doing the same.

Interestingly, the recent emails I have had from photobucket have all been flagged as spam by Thunderbird, while a link I clicked on in one of the ads on photobucket yesterday was blocked by Norton Security in a major way.

[Ismene]

I've often had issues viewing photos on Photobucket.

There's Flickr, of course, though I haven't kept up with recent changes, so I don't know if they are doing similar. I use Dropshots for personal photos, but I haven't tried it on the forum.

[Macruran]

imgur is a free host I use all the time and recommend. It's actually better not to make an account because those have limits, whereas uploading without an account does not.

Ultimately everything online can disappear at any moment.

[Tiermann]

I mix between hosting at my own site and using a paid Flickr account. I don't know how good Flickr's free account is but the paid is great and allows off site linking easily.

[Georgeag1972]

The pictures I have sent until 2013 are still on the forum. From 2012 and back are not visible. There is not way to pay these money to have an account on Photobucket.

Can someone tell me how to use attachments? I have tryed it in the past but I didn't understand what I must do.
Is there a thread on the forum with some explanations?

George.

[Hadoque]

I was recommended by some here to use Photobucket, but I (gladly) never did it. I prefer to keep my pics saved at my own personal hard-& software, as I anticipated things like this would happen.
Soon other free hosting sits will follow suit and you´ll have to pay, mark my words. Or you´ll get a service to pull your hairs out, like often already is the case.
I predict same will happen sooner or later with social media, even when Suckerberg keeps insisting his Fakebook will remain for free. Money makes the world go round, they say. (Though I´m sure it are laws of physics that do the trick.)

I´d like to use this occasion once again to plead for allowing larger attachements then 100KB here on PF.  No need for huge pic-sizes like on f.e. fakebook, but picture-sizes same as on Klickywelt would already be a great improvement.


@George:
When you start typing a post or a reply, you see the sentence "attachements and other options" directly below the text-field.
A few CMs further down you should see "Attach:" with a button "choose file". There you click on to upload pictures from your computer, laptop, mac, Intergalactic Iphone or whatever hardware you use.
You should first resize your pictures to a max. size of 100KB. You can attach 4 pics per post. For uploading more then 4 pictures, you have to add another or more posts.

[Pynedor]

Thanks for letting us know about this, GrahamB. I saw this issue coming up elsewhere too. My threads (and many others too) are now full of those terrible placeholders.

[bonniebeth]

I discovered this a few days ago and am pretty upset about it. It means all my photo stories, dioramas, everything I've ever posted here is now lacking pictures. What's worse, I don't have most of those pics anywhere but photobucket due to a computer crash, and I'm having trouble downloading them from photobucket. Very frustrating.

Problem with attaching photos here is I believe there's a limit on how many any given member can attach.

[Georgeag1972]

@George:
When you start typing a post or a reply, you see the sentence "attachements and other options" directly below the text-field.
A few CMs further down you should see "Attach:" with a button "choose file". There you click on to upload pictures from your computer, laptop, mac, Intergalactic Iphone or whatever hardware you use.
You should first resize your pictures to a max. size of 100KB. You can attach 4 pics per post. For uploading more then 4 pictures, you have to add another or more posts.

Thanks for the answer Hadoque.

George,