Photobucket no longer allows hotlinking from free accounts...

[lostpony]

What happens when you try to download that specific image? Do you download the gauge image? I'm wondering if the thumbnail is altered but the original image is intact.

because the http://photobucket.com/p500/ page says that the images are safe and downloadable-- you just can't 3rd party host them.

WOW.  OK, I just checked....when I click the gauge where my image is supposed to be, I see the library entry showing also the gauge.

Looks like this is my bad...  I didn't try downloading it anyway before, believing the resultant image would be the gauge not the image.

I just tried it now and I am pleased to report that I was mistaken, Yaay!  The actual image arrived instead of the gauge.

Thanks banditpony for persisting on this in spite of my naysaying. 

Everyone, do please make sure to try downloading your images even if they show the gauge because in at least this one example, the actual image was still there even though it was hidden under the gauge mask.  Sorry I was so quick to despair on this.

[Libelle]

What happens when you try to download that specific image? Do you download the gauge image? I'm wondering if the thumbnail is altered but the original image is intact.

I tried this with the picture in sailorstitch's signature. When I clicked the link, I got the gauge image. However, when I right-clicked the gauge image and chose "view image", I got sailorstitch's original picture!

[sailorstitch]

What happens when you try to download that specific image? Do you download the gauge image? I'm wondering if the thumbnail is altered but the original image is intact.

I tried this with the picture in sailorstitch's signature. When I clicked the link, I got the gauge image. However, when I right-clicked the gauge image and chose "view image", I got sailorstitch's original picture!

Good thing I haven't gotten around to fixing my MLP pictures yet. LOL

sailorstitch

[Libelle]

What happens when you try to download that specific image? Do you download the gauge image? I'm wondering if the thumbnail is altered but the original image is intact.

I tried this with the picture in sailorstitch's signature. When I clicked the link, I got the gauge image. However, when I right-clicked the gauge image and chose "view image", I got sailorstitch's original picture!

Good thing I haven't gotten around to fixing my MLP pictures yet. LOL

sailorstitch

Lol, yes, that's what I thought as well!

Another good thing is that it seems possible to access one's pictures in order to save them after all - even if it involves a lot of work.

[Carrehz]

Ah, that's awesome that they can be saved after all!!

I'm guessing it's a bandwidth thing too - my Photobucket doesn't seem to have been hit yet, but then about all the pics I still had on there are on pages where very few people would be looking at them (i.e. not on a forum page that'd be looked at many times). If that makes sense. Meanwhile almost all the pics I -have- seen get taken down, are in places where they'd get a lot of hits. So I'm wondering if pics getting many many hits is what triggers the gauge image appearing.

I do agree with Lostpony's "frog-in-boiling-water" analogy too, though. There's got to be a reason why they haven't rolled it out for everyone :s.

[lonewolf]

Just now reading up on this. Imageshack did the same thing  a couple years ago.
So far I still have access to my account. If they do lock it, pretty much everything I have there I still have on this computer (and most of those are just memes I reuploaded ).
As for other sites: Last I knew Flickr and Imgur both have limits to how much you can upload (unless you pay). I use Tinypic for the most part (they do try a popunder ad on you, but my combination of Adblock, No Script, and UBlock  shoots all of their ads down).
That really narrows down the number of hosting sites.

[banditpony]

What happens when you try to download that specific image? Do you download the gauge image? I'm wondering if the thumbnail is altered but the original image is intact.

because the http://photobucket.com/p500/ page says that the images are safe and downloadable-- you just can't 3rd party host them.

WOW.  OK, I just checked....when I click the gauge where my image is supposed to be, I see the library entry showing also the gauge.

Looks like this is my bad...  I didn't try downloading it anyway before, believing the resultant image would be the gauge not the image.

I just tried it now and I am pleased to report that I was mistaken, Yaay!  The actual image arrived instead of the gauge.

Thanks banditpony for persisting on this in spite of my naysaying. 

Everyone, do please make sure to try downloading your images even if they show the gauge because in at least this one example, the actual image was still there even though it was hidden under the gauge mask.  Sorry I was so quick to despair on this.

It's not your bad. It "appears" the image is gone. It's very deceiving and confusing. I didn't want people to think their images are lost if they aren't. but... maybe one day they will be gone!

But again, to everyone, download your images now. This is a lesson not to put all of your eggs in one basket.

Just now reading up on this. Imageshack did the same thing  a couple years ago.

Yeah. I lost all of my images on imageshack. I think I had warnings, but the time I looked, they were gone. Lots of weird things that didn't make it past computer upgrades since 1998.

So that's my point. EVERYONE needs to download their images now. Photobucket didn't take away the storage. They just stopped their free hosting services. But they can take away the images too.

There's lots of options out there for image storage, sharing, and hosting. But the best thing is to have your own storage on top of the "free" services. (nothing is for free).

[Carrehz]

Yup, I remember Imageshack going down too.

I'd be careful using Tinypic; a friend of mine had some of her images deleted from there without warning, and I've seen a few cases where people's images hosted on there have been replaced with an entirely different image (sometimes rather graphic ones O_O).

And yes, yes, always keep backups! Keep backups of backups!! Just, in general, on the internet, if you think you'll miss it if it's gone, SAVE IT. I've lost stuff from computer crashes or sites dying (anyone remember xs.to? An old image-hosting site from the mid-2000s) before and I'd give anything to get those back. Back up everything!!

[Noxxbunny]

And yes, yes, always keep backups! Keep backups of backups!! Just, in general, on the internet, if you think you'll miss it if it's gone, SAVE IT. I've lost stuff from computer crashes or sites dying (anyone remember xs.to? An old image-hosting site from the mid-2000s) before and I'd give anything to get those back. Back up everything!!

This. This whole thing is just annoying and inconvenient to me. Anything that's on my PB, I have backed up in quadruplicate in various places... Quadruplicate is probably excessive for most, but I'm thorough and paranoid about data loss 

[Carrehz]

And yes, yes, always keep backups! Keep backups of backups!! Just, in general, on the internet, if you think you'll miss it if it's gone, SAVE IT. I've lost stuff from computer crashes or sites dying (anyone remember xs.to? An old image-hosting site from the mid-2000s) before and I'd give anything to get those back. Back up everything!!

This. This whole thing is just annoying and inconvenient to me. Anything that's on my PB, I have backed up in quadruplicate in various places... Quadruplicate is probably excessive for most, but I'm thorough and paranoid about data loss 

I don't think it's excessive at all, I'm the same way I admit I didn't have backups of some of the stuff on my Photobucket before this, but I've rectified that now I'm really more worried about the thousands of other peoples' pictures on there than my own stuff, tbh.

[lostpony]

The issue for me is organization.

I have lots of things backed up, and backups of the backups, but over time I lose track of what is where and as the data grows, having too many copies of some things increases the problem with making sure I have any copies at all of something else.  Especially smartfone pictures which really proliferate.

The other issue I have with backups is things that are simply not backup up yet...recent work that can be lost when a computer dies etc.  I have several months of work trapped on a small laptop that had parrot-damage to its keyboard, specifically the delete key is missing but also shorted, so it simply deletes everything you try to look at and when it happened I had a look in the recycle bin to undelete things and it started dumping everything that had been moved there so I was like Nooooo and just shut it off.  At some point I'm going to cut the traces on the keyboard's PCB and rescue my files that didn't get purged.  Eh. 

Now that flash drives are as big and fast as they are, my plan is to move away from keeping active data on the local drives at all, and just keep working files directly on flash, then use the capacity on the local drives to do date-based incremental backups of the flash drives, with occasional full-copy flash backups that will be actually labelled and made in at least two copies that are kept offsite in at least two different places.  And....keep an index of backups too.  Dreaming now, right?

For me the worst was in about 2005 when I had a lot of freight stolen in transit and lost a lot of data that was in my shipping container, and later the backups were also lost in another location where they were kept.  So 2 copies of data can prove insufficient....I lost the complete local drive of unpublished works by a deceased family member that I was supposed to help publish.  I was so busy at the time that I never even got to read the material myself so it's just a huge indescribable and unforgivable loss.

Most recently, while I have copies of everything I had on Photobucket, I didn't have them in a consolidated archive so scraping them all together from their various different places would have been pretty unlikely.

So....backups are nice but a well-maintained system of organization is just as important especially when circumstances get tough and you get distracted from precautions you would ordinarily put time into.

[Hannah66665]

My accounts are starting to get hit with it now... thankfully I backed up. Just got done fixing my sig and profile images here. @_@

[Raindrop]

I downloaded all my photos and closed out my account.  You would think they were making enough money with all of the pop-up ads!

[Teddy]

Thanks for all the help and info in this thread! I just downloaded all my Photobucket images to my computer and will use imgur from now on. I also just deleted my Photobucket account, which I have had for 13 years. How sad that they made this hasty (and quite frankly, evil) decision without giving us any warning.

Have a nice life, Photobucket!

[Taffeta]

So I wasn't going to download any of my PB stuff but I did have some older things on there which I probably have on another disc somewhere but you know, just in case. So after a lot of refreshing and clicking, they downloaded.

Though in the folder they all look fine and normal, when going through them on preview, some of the images were stretched and distorted to look like they were just a long thin line.

I suggest people check their images are fine before deleting their account. It might just have been something with the format of my images, but they were all JPG images, not gif or any other format, so I wanted to just flag this in case it affects anyone else.

Again, they look fine when you open the zip, extract them and view the thumbnails in the folder, but on preview they were warped. It also might just be an issue with preview or with my PC, because my PC is evil, but just in case...better safe than sorry.