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

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

#31

Post by tyingq »

gizmo wrote: post #24
tyingq wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's also a note that getting your images out to move them to another provider is deliberately difficult.

In any case, how most photobucket users feel about it will ultimately matter more than what we outside observers think.

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

#32

Post by chippy »

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?

It's possible that Imgur will, when it gets as old as Photobucket, change their terms and start charging more. Will we expect people in tech forums in the future to be writing "What does anyone still use Imgur?"

The answer to both the future and the present questions is that they have been using it in the past (inertia) and have not moved their thousands of images (cost/pain).

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

#33

Post by detaro »

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…

A lot of the use probably is not all that serious in volume and "locked" to hotlinking. Suddenly requiring quite a lot of money for hotlinking is quite a big change.

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

#34

Post by tedmiston »

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…

I think the ransom is that people have been using Photobucket to host images posted on forums for 10+ years, often hotlinked. Suddenly all of those historical hotlinks are going to break unless each user pays $400/year.

Changing the terms is one thing, but I think OP is upset that old images aren't grandfathered.

Also, I know one obvious solution is to just move all of one's images to a new host and edit the posts, but not all forums allow editing very old posts, some threads will be locked, etc.

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

#35

Post by tyingq »

vbezhenar wrote: post #23
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.

That's technically a good idea, but also exposes you to a bunch of DMCA problems if you don't limit it to known image hosts. Not that the requests would be legitimate, but it's still a nuisance.

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

#36

Post by tyingq »

ransom1538 wrote: post #27

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 goo…

I'd probably implement that as a "forever caching" image proxy hosted on a subdomain of my forum domain, plus the batch/live domain replacement for the database. Then it also works for future attempts to embed photobucket images, and doesn't require downloading all the existing images at once.

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

#37

Post by danpalmer »

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…

Bear in mind that this is not a fee for _forums_ to pay (where $400 a month for image embedding could be reasonable). This is a fee for the _users_ to pay, to be able to embed the images on their Photobucket accounts elsewhere on the web.

I doubt many users would be interested in paying $35 for the "linking" version (which is literally just links, not embedding), let alone the $400 version.

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

#38

Post by tyingq »

danpalmer wrote: post #37
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…

Bear in mind that this is not a fee for _forums_ to pay (where $400 a month for image embedding could be reasonable). This is a fee for the _users_ to pay, to be able to embed the images on their Photobucket accounts elsewhere on the web. I doubt many users would be interested in paying $35 for the "linking" version (which is literally just links, not embedding), let alone the $400 version.

I'm not seeing a $35 linking version...it's $100/year. The "no links / no embedding" plan is $60/year, which is just hilarious for 50GB of mostly useless storage. http://photobucket.com/pricing

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

#39

Post by AndrewStephens »

Photobucket are within their rights to do this but it is really sad that so much of the message board culture is inaccessible because popular free image hosts tend to go away after a few years. I would lay money that 90% of posts over 10 years old have broken images.

The moral of the story is for forums to host images themselves, but nobody wants to do that because:

a) uploading files is annoying to implement and exposes the forum to security issues

b) storing the files can take a huge amount of disk space

c) serving the files can take a huge amount of bandwidth

d) the first message board to allow uploading files would just become a huge dumping ground of images for other boards to link to, necessitating implementing a referer block just like Photobucket

Personally I think that the message board developers have really dropped the ball by refusing to implement a really bullet-proof solution into their software by default. It is a hard problem but the only real solution is to host the images yourself. Third-parties are always going to let you down eventually because their goals do not align with yours.

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

#40

Post by AndrewStephens »

tyingq wrote: post #35
vbezhenar wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's technically a good idea, but also exposes you to a bunch of DMCA problems if you don't limit it to known image hosts. Not that the requests would be legitimate, but it's still a nuisance.

You are exposed to the DMCA whether you host the images yourself of not.
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