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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

#21

Post by throwaway2016a »

I think it is completely reasonable to charge for hot linking. There are only two problems:

- Hot-linking seems to be one of the main use cases people have for their service so they are disabling a use case that people have relied on for years (making a free service no longer free is always harder than charging from day one)

- This is significantly more expensive to most people than just using AWS S3 or similar. It's just one easy to write / follow AWS tutorial or micro-app away from being obsolete.

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

#22

Post by userbinator »

IshKebab wrote: post #16
benguild wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you just put the image in an with on?

No. Think about where photobucket is used.

Also, just turning off the referer doesn't work for Photobucket --- you need to send it the right one.

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

#23

Post by vbezhenar »

CorpOverreach wrote: post #6

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…

Forum should download and host linked images. External links are not reliable and it's not the first incident.

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

#24

Post by gizmo »

tyingq wrote: post #18
gizmo wrote: post #5

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…

They probably consider it ransom because the terms were changed after the relationship was established. Unlimited linking probably doesn't include embedding. So, if they were on a lower end plan, something that used to be offered was taken away. After they invested time in uploading and embedding lots of images.

Terms are _always_ subject to change.

We're talking about 1 dollar per day for image hosting here. These panicky reactions seem totally overblown to me. I don't think this is really about the price as an absolute number. This is more of an emotional reaction about the price changing, which some people feel is fundamentally unfair.

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

#26

Post by tedmiston »

CorpOverreach wrote: post #6

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…

Not really a loss of history as much as broken links. The files still exist.

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

#27

Post by ransom1538 »

This will be a big hit to old forums. I think phpbb allows you to just set a image with link [link] in a post. So, in your phpbb database you would have some link like: http://photobucket.cdn.etc./32328hio/image.jpg hard coded into the table. [links] would have never been in the album like the OP suggests downloading. They need a quick python script to locate links, upload the contents, replace the url (all using google images, s3 etc).

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

#28

Post by DavidBuchanan »

boyce wrote: post #10
schitzapplebits wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I wrote a simple extension to disable the new direct image link behaviour: https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/imgur-anti-anti-hotlink

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

#29

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #21

I think it is completely reasonable to charge for hot linking. There are only two problems: - Hot-linking seems to be one of the main use cases people have for their service so they are disabling a use case that people have relied on for years (making a free service no longer free is always harder than charging from day one) - This is significantly more expensive to most people than just using AWS S3 or similar. It's…

[deleted]

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

#30

Post by signal11 »

tedmiston wrote: post #25

Imgur has been around for a long time now, and their terms allow hotlinking on forums. Clearly consumers aren't going to pay $400/year for this feature. Why does anyone still use Photobucket?

There was a story[1] a few days ago about how imgur was becoming more annoying and obtrusive in the face of Reddit's new image hosting features. Ultimately, for image hosting (like everything else) there's no free lunch.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14595212

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