Photobucket Has Discontinued Free Photo Hotlinking...

[MCDemuth]

This digital world could disappear tomorrow, all of it.

It may not disappear, but everything IS quickly becoming a service or a subscription. There won't be any place on the internet that isn't free. I'm waiting for Facebook and Twitter to start charging people for access...

Money doesn't grow on trees. And people salaries usually don't increase every month. So, sooner or later EVERYONE is going to have to pick and choose what they want to be a part of...

That might be a good thing in terms of getting rid of trolls and such, but...

As a society it won't be a good thing. The internet will fracture into millions of pieces. Everyone will only be able to choose a few of those pieces... Especially if every place decides to charge $33.00 A MONTH to access it.

And what makes this worse, is how it seems we have to have it all, in order to keep ourselves from "living under rocks" and for basic survival.

I still don't understand why everyone has to buy the newest iPhone every year... Doesn't last years model still work and make phone calls? (It must be nice to have so much money that you can throw away millions of things you own every year and go out and buy all new.)

Clothing, Food, Utilities, Insurance, Healthcare, Gasoline, Computer Maintenance, Communications, Entertainment, TAXES... And now God Only Knows how many services and subscriptions...

$33.00 A MONTH for photo hotlinking too?

I can't afford that. Heck, I already can't afford most of what people are charging now.


It may not happen soon, but at the rate we are going with having to pay for every little thing just to access the internet... Sooner or later, the Great Internet Collapse will come...

[eolesen]

Dunno. I think it's reasonable to pay for what you value... After several subscription services for file storage shut the door, I bought an annual subscription to Dropbox and don't regret it. I was spending at least that much in hard drives and thumb drives over a three year period, so don't view it as a cost but as an investment.

Since I have all my photos tucked away safely in multiple forms of media already, it's no great loss if I lose the galleries I've posted to Flickr or Picasa or wherever for public viewing. Hopefully they don't change direction.

I could lose Facebook and Twitter tomorrow and not notice.

[qballbandit]

I don't think it unreasonable for anyone who provides a service, to have their costs covered, at the very least. We get it for free, and then think "free" is owed to us when it's taken away.

Not quite the same, but I remember sitting in a college class (Media related) when cable TV first became available to the masses. Our teacher was professing that it would only be a short matter of time that commercials would be the norm - no different than public TV - because the originating broadcast points would never be able to sustain "uninterrupted, continual programming". That shocked me, but made perfect sense.
So does internet companies that offer free services when at their Genesis, but after a bazillion people eat at their operating cost, it's time for some good old fashion "Show me the money!!!!".

[geepster775]

Obviously a price of $399 a year is very indicative that the majority of Photobucket users are no longer people like us, but rather are the people who have a storefront on Ebay or Amazon and who have been chasing free bandwidth for listing photos as they make a buck. The casual user is over on Instagram or Facebook now, where they don't charge you, but instead rape your privacy and monetize your computer habits and there is more social riff-raff to wade through.

ImageShack is $38 a year for the low end plan. That is in line with a First Class Membership here or a subscription to Trainorders and the like. ImageShack has changed their business to cater more to professional photographers who want a place to showcase their skills but don't want the bandwidth costs of high quality images attached to their private business domains.

I think the First Class Membership function of this site is mistargeted. People really are no longer paying for faster download speeds in an era where freeware contributions have fallen off the cliff at the same time higher quality payware is shaping more and more of the future. Most people who buy First Class Memberships nowadays here are essentially 'donating to the cause' to keep the site running and the lights on. Instead of getting faster download speeds, why not offer a MUCH improved image hosting function here, bring ImageShack and Photobucket functions in-house in a much more functional way. Having to log in to see attached images, and paltry 100 mb file sizes associated with hosting here are wholly inadequate for today's 4K monitor generation. It is funny to see 800 users browsing on this site, but only 60 actually logged in, where only those 60 can actually see images hosted here by this site. Talk about a waste of effort, all to present a whopping 60 users with an image.

[apco25]

Deleted...rather spend money on drop box

[eolesen]

‪Behind Denver-based Photobucket's unpopular decision to go from free to $399

http://dpo.st/2vdijWx via @denverpost‬

[ThatSolitaryGuy]

I was going to ask if this affects users who haven't used up their first free 2 GB, but a cursory glance at some of my other forum posts answered that pretty quickly.

It's a shame that it's come to this. I understand the reasoning for doing this, but $399 a year? Some small business owners could probably manage that, but this doesn't seem like a very reasonable demand for an infrequent users (or students like myself) , who only use the service for certain occasions and generally don't need much memory in their storage library (I was surprised to find that I only used about 60 MB of storage). I'd rather pay a small fee for every photo that I uploaded than a single yearly fee of that size. It would still be annoying, but I would at least be paying for only as much as I am utilizing.

In the mean time, I'll probably be turning over to Flickr, assuming it's not already on the verge of the same kind of transformation.

[buzz456]

Facebook is making a ton of money with their advertising. The reason they get all this money is telling the advertisers about the traffic they get. If they started charging to be on there a whole lot of people would decide that they didn't really need to be on there that bad and their advertising revenue would go down as the visit count went down. Don't look for Facebook to start charging anytime soon. The formula works so why change it.
As far as Twitter it is so brainless that who knows what its future is.

[ex-railwayman]

The Photobucket fallout has been large. A discussion topic I've been following on the Trains website has lost thousands of images because of this, and the author has no time to go and rebuild six years of posts...

Many Trainzers and ex-Trainzers started posting our screenshots way back in 2003 when Peebucket started their hosting service, I also posted to various Flight Simulator forums and many other institutions, there's no way in this world am I, and many others, going to trawl through 14 years' worth of screenshots to rectify posts, sorry, I have lost all interest now, the new Peebucket logo is all that is left for folks to look at.

Cheerz. ex-railwayman.

[seagoon]

There are dozens of web-hosting sites to choose from, some free, some costing no more than $1.00 per year (Alibaba, for example).
Restrictions apply, of course, on the amount of traffic per month and also on the maximum space available.

But for someone posting regular items on eBay or similar, or who wants to link to photos of their cat or holiday snaps, a web-site works well.