Photobucket Demands $400 Ransom to Release Photos

[Emptymag]

I am not familiar with how a site like that works. Does it cost them money to keep hosting the photographs that are already in threads? If it does I have mixed feelings on it. If it does not I stand by my earlier post about but stuff wished on them.

Here's how it works.

For eternity they have offered free hosting with a limit to the space for the free accounts.
Paid accounts got more space.
There were typically three levels of paid accounts. $20/yr $80/yr $150/yr (just making up the numbers as an example)

Things did change over the years with the biggest changes being less space offered for the free accounts..

Older accounts (free or paid) tended to be grandfathered as changes came about.
My original free account spanned YEARS and still had a lot of room while my newer free accounts had much less and I came near to filling them within a year.

Out of the blue they said "you have exceeded your allowable space" (because they changed the rules without notification), if you want to post 3rd party images on forums please upgrade to the $400 paid service.

Assholes.

The end.

[streaker69]

Out of the blue they said "you have exceeded your allowable space" (because they changed the rules without notification), if you want to post 3rd party images on forums please upgrade to the $400 paid service.

Assholes.

The end.

It actually wasn't without notification. Emails did go out telling everyone to review their new TOS. Somewhere buried in the TOS was new terms.

[JDA58]

I DIDN'T even exceeded my space not even close.. but because I posted pictures from photobucket to forums...that was now a no no And for ONLY $400 .......

[Emptymag]

I DIDN'T even exceeded my space not even close.. but because I posted pictures from photobucket to forums...that was now a no no And for ONLY $400 .......

There was never a way TO exceed your allotted space - when you reached your limit, no more files could be uploaded.

So this whole "exceeded your limit" thing is horseshit.

They simply decided that X many millions of people use Photobucket. We're gonna try and extort a ridiculous amount of money from as many people as we can instead of setting the price at a reasonable amount that would entice almost everyone to upgrade.

[JDA58]

Im sure that was one hell of a meeting....... Hey I know a way we can bring in another $40 + Million .... Fuck that lets make it $400 +

[Gunsnwater]

Photobucket was a bad business model to begin with. I'm surprised that it lasted as long as it did. They should have just pulled the plug. It sucks because of how much of the web is shot full of holes.

[Steve32]

Photobucket pretty much murdered every single picture thread on the Internet. I'm glad I use just Youtube and Imgur for sharing galleries and photos. Not that I would trust Youtube nowadays... :-/

[streaker69]

Take a second to consider the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of "tutorial" posts on forums the world wide.
Instructions on how to fix a car, a washing machine, a gun - posts about any number of things that told a story, that helped to inspire, or share the progress of a recovering child, pet, or great grandmother - all reduced to nothing but text and no images - gone - rendered useless.

People spent untold numbers of hours telling stories and posting their experiences to help others who may be looking for a "how to" do something, and now Photobucket has shit on all of it.

The hubbub certainly varies per individual, but I can assure you that it's a big deal what they did to everyone - especially HOW they did it.

This is the biggest issue for me. I've read countless "How to's" over the years on the internet. Now many of them are broken, and will probably never be fixed because the people that wrote them won't be bothered to fix them. It's extremely time consuming to go back through years of work and reupload those pictures to a new host and repair the links. While someone may have been willing to write a how to out of kindness years ago when someone asked for help. Mostly likely they're not going to go back and fix them now. All that knowledge is now gone, probably never to return, all because people trusted a company to not be a dick.

[soberbyker]

I posted the way around that a few posts ago, if you have stuff on PB that you need, and you can't download your albums, there's a way around the lock preventing album downloads that I have provided below.

Finally finished downloading my PB photo's via the app I posted earlier, I had over 18GB of photo's, many of which ended up on forums like this.

They still work here and elsewhere for now, by the end of the year when my subscription runs out they too will have the BS ransom note instead of my photos. I'm not paying the ransom, nor am I looking to go through that again, so i more than likely won't post my own photo's anymore, just stuff I can hotlink from other places.

Fuck PB with a bad of disease infected dicks.

[fleva40]

I just used photobucket to host pics on here yesterday