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Photobucket limits displaying of images on external sites to $40/month plan

blog.norphil.co.uk

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Re: Photobucket limits displaying of images on external sites to $40/month plan

#5

Post by gizmo »

How is this ransom? You just have to pay money to use their service. $35 a month isn't a lot of money for anything remotely serious.

Also, photobucket has a $10 a month plan for up to 100GB of image storage that supports "unlimited linking". Most forums won't need more than that. Nothing about this pricing page looks extortionate to me: http://photobucket.com/pricing

Maybe I'm missing something important here, but to me it looks like some people have a very rigid view of what online services ought to cost.

Re: Photobucket limits displaying of images on external sites to $40/month plan

#6

Post by CorpOverreach »

I've been seeing this the past week on a lot of forums that I still frequent.

There's one particular car forum where I've been following a guy for the past three years doing a project car build. 80+ pages on the thread, with hundreds of images. Now they're blocked.

Several other big threads suffered similar fates.

Needless to say, none of them have any plans on paying up $400 to Photobucket.

The real loss here is the potential loss of history - many niche forums have 15+ years of history on them, a lot of it in the form of how-to guides, FAQs, etc about things you won't find in any manual.

Re: Photobucket limits displaying of images on external sites to $40/month plan

#7

Post by userbinator »

It's really $400 for the privilege of allowing you to send an arbitrary Referer: header with every request, no? ;-)

Sometimes I've run into a similar issue where links I post work fine for me but others have complained that they could only be accessed by copy-pasting into a new window. Those with their browsers' referers disabled or same-domain-only have probably encountered this before.

More fun is to "fake" the referer header by configuring your filtering proxy to always send the one the site expects.

I suppose, like adblocking, once users smarten up to it and/or browsers disable referers by default, this sort of ridiculousness will slowly fade away or change.

Edit: I can confirm this Proxomitron filter works to make all the images show up in the linked forum thread:

    In = FALSE
    Out = TRUE
    Key = "Referer: photoFucket"
    URL = "*.photobucket.com"
    Match = "*"
    Replace = "http://www.photobucket.com/"

Re: Photobucket limits displaying of images on external sites to $40/month plan

#9

Post by jk563 »

More accurately, Photobucket has a $399.99 tier, and this is the only tier which allows using them as a third party host for images embedded on other sites. Images belonging to an account that is not on this tier well get replaced with an image indicating the feature needs unlocking.

Re: Photobucket limits displaying of images on external sites to $40/month plan

#10

Post by boyce »

schitzapplebits wrote: post #4
DigitalSea wrote: post #3

I forgot that Photobucket even existed, with far more superior choices like Google Photos and Dropbox existing. This is insane, RIP Photobucket.

What about imgur?

Only a matter of time before they do something about hotlinking. Direct image links now redirect to tell you to download their app, I'd be surprised if they didn't start watermarking embedded images or putting ads on them. Reddit hosting images on their own site haven't helped imgur
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