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Want your images back? That'll be $5

lutr.dev

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Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#221

Post by calc_exe »

joshstrange wrote: post #194
calc_exe wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And I wouldn't threaten the chargeback. If they refuse the refund or ignore you, then just file a chargeback. To me, ideally the end result is a chargeback instead a customer support refund. Otherwise they have no incentive to change. A high chargeback percentage could be that incentive. I think the credit card companies expect you to attempt to talk it out with the merchant first though, so you'd still want…

That's fair and the practices here do allow for immediate chargeback in my book. My suggestion for reaching out to support comes mostly from being on the other end of chargebacks and being frustrated when that's the first/only tool people reach for. Chargebacks don't tell the full story, telling support "Hey you told me to pay $5 to see my pictures but there were no pictures. Give me my money or I'll file a chargebac…

Gotcha, I may have made some assumptions on how the process works. From the handful of chargeback stories I've heard from merchants, the credit card company passed along the cardholder's reasoning to the merchant when issuing the chargeback. So the merchant was able to figure out why the customer was unhappy. But that's anecdotal, I don't actually know if that's standard.

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#222

Post by joshstrange »

calc_exe wrote: post #221
joshstrange wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair and the practices here do allow for immediate chargeback in my book. My suggestion for reaching out to support comes mostly from being on the other end of chargebacks and being frustrated when that's the first/only tool people reach for. Chargebacks don't tell the full story, telling support "Hey you told me to pay $5 to see my pictures but there were no pictures. Give me my money or I'll file a chargebac…

Gotcha, I may have made some assumptions on how the process works. From the handful of chargeback stories I've heard from merchants, the credit card company passed along the cardholder's reasoning to the merchant when issuing the chargeback. So the merchant was able to figure out why the customer was unhappy. But that's anecdotal, I don't actually know if that's standard.

The chargebacks I've received all just have a very generic category [0]. I've never see free-form text entry reasons that would allow the customer to explain the "why". Maybe their bank asks them for that info but it's not passed along.

[0] https://docs.stripe.com/disputes/categories?dispute-category...

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#223

Post by netsharc »

lutr wrote: post #66
uberex wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can charge back months after. Best to ask for refund first (as in now, despite their legally irrelevant time limit) as the CC would expect you to do that first.

Huh, never did a charge back in my life (I'm not from the US, charge backs aren't a big thing here). I'll give it a shot, just for fun :). I use a debit card and I wasn't even sure you can do charge backs with them. But yes, apparently!

Revenge after they fucked around with you is what makes doing this procedure worth it...

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#224

Post by netsharc »

geor9e wrote: post #206

If Google Photos gave me my photos in one go, exactly as they are in the app, I'd gladly pay $5. As it stands, they offer "Takeout" for free. This process gives you hundreds of zip files with the photos distributed into deep subfolders by date. That would be forgivable if it weren't for the fact that they revert all their processing and deduping, leaving you with 20 copies of the same file scattered in random places.…

Huh, that reminds me of trying to download photos shared by other people after a group trip. Select all, download, GPhotos claims to have zipped all of it, but nope, the zip was missing a lottt of files...

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#225

Post by netsharc »

lutr wrote: post #198
codazoda wrote: post #190

At least you were able to restore them. 25 years ago I was using the service and went a while without logging in. They deleted some of my favorite photos. They were photos I had taken with a cheap $20 digital camera (pushing it to it's limits). I hadn't backed my photo's up anywhere else so they were just lost. Edit: I see now that there were actually no photos to restore. A second question I wondered is if I could g…

This is 100% true. I also lost all my old Yahoo accounts because I didn't log into them for >1 year. Same for a lot of videos I made on a nice little site called GoAnimate. So keeping data is better than removing it! Even charging a fee feels fair-ish. But forcing me to sign up for a subscription on an account I don't actually even have any data? Weeeelll, this doesn't feel so nice :)

I use a Yahoo address for "throwaway" stuff like online shops. They had a catastrophe and lost some people's mail. I never got such an email, but one time I looked, and it lost all of my emails before 2000. Yeah I'm that old, when Yahoo launched an email service in 1996, I thought, "An @yahoo.com address?! That's so cool! I have to get one!".

In theory a copy of the emails are on a harddisk, but its control board melted, and when I got the same model disk (to transplant its control board onto the disk with data), I couldn't find the original disk...

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#226

Post by xp84 »

Groxx wrote: post #215
xp84 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...or $11 for a month, and you can cancel it? Where do people think the money comes from to store gigs and gigs of photos literally forever?

Keep in mind that this is a brand which has offered 1TB free in the past. They kinda only have themselves to blame for any minimum-price assumptions.

I suppose, but that "brand" was owned by many different people, and the current one has very little to do with whatever people did in the past. At a certain point, one should at minimum back up all one's stuff when ownership changes, just in case the ZIRP economics don't exist to float those AWS bills anymore.

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#227

Post by drnick1 »

realityfactchex wrote: post #169

What's the best alternative? Flickr? I don't want to self-host my photos, too much management. I don't want to use Apple or Google or MS Clouds for various reasons. I do want to support a pure-play, independent-ish, profitable, consumer friendly platform. To upload hires shots and have them easy to tag/share/access among those to whom they may be of interest. I expect to pay, but not through the nose. Reliability mat…

The Nextcloud app on my phone automatically backs up my pictures to my Nextcloud instance. This is painless to run in a Docker container at home, but Nextcloud also has a subscription service if you don't want to self-host, and your money funds free software.

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#228

Post by dorgo »

root-parent wrote: post #45
okramcivokram wrote: post #18

I have received the email that my photobucket account is going to be deleted, so I've logged in after who knows how many years and got offered the same thing, to subscribe. Instead I've went to close the account and in the process (or somewhere else, don't remember exactly) there was an option to first download all the data which I've used and got the images back (there were just a few as I haven't used the service r…

I predict that in the future, when you cancel an LLM subscription, they will threaten that unless you pay, to fully delete your anonymized chats, they will be public as paid training data. You know ...that is how we managed to offer you such a cheap subscription...

Isn't this how Google operates? I have their AI subscription (about $20 per month). If you want to have a chat history (retain chats after reload) or connect the LLM to Google services (Drive, Emails) you have to activate an option which also allows training. If you don't want to allow training then the subscription is basically useless.

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#229

Post by sib »

realityfactchex wrote: post #169

What's the best alternative? Flickr? I don't want to self-host my photos, too much management. I don't want to use Apple or Google or MS Clouds for various reasons. I do want to support a pure-play, independent-ish, profitable, consumer friendly platform. To upload hires shots and have them easy to tag/share/access among those to whom they may be of interest. I expect to pay, but not through the nose. Reliability mat…

You could try SmugMug - I was a happy customer for almost 20 years

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#230

Post by oasisbob »

mbo wrote: post #68

Why are we complaining about this as a corporate greed thing? (I do agree that it's bad that there were no images preserved and that component of the post is justifiable) Obviously Photobucket completely failed to properly monetize, and was sold to Fox and then offloaded to some no-name startup called Ontela ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photobucket ). The service could have been shutdown completely and the harddri…

If a PE vulture keeps a company with marginal profitability alive, there is absolutely no way they're devoting any kind type of human capital to proper maintenance.

It's likely running on the original infrastructure from acquisition, is full of EOL dependencies, and likely wasn't well-secured to begin with even before the takeover.

Any changes to regulatory requirements are also likely ignored. The EULA is probably full of all sorts of falsehoods about how they maintain the site. ("We use commercially standard methods to secure and blah blah blah ...")

Keeping these kinds of zombie sites online is not a win-win situation.

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