Phuck-U Photobucket!

[manga_blue]

I'd advise everyone affected not to pay up to Photobucket for an account. As well as thousands of forums there are tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of small to medium businesses around the globe that depended on them for their advertising images, including a lot of ebay, etsy and Amazon content. The mounting global user backlash against this may wipe out Photobucket.

[smy0003]

Thanks to all you guys, paying for the privilege to entertain little ol' me with your piccies !
Me, I'm in the dark ages. I rarely take pictures, hardly any worth sharing.

You pull quite a crowd when you get the SR20 out, I'd have to disagree.

Sent from my LG-H815 using Tapatalk

[bruce]

I'd rather look at the real thing than pictures !

[beavis]

My build thread is rampant with dead image links.
Well, No i sure am glad I moved to Imgur a while ago.

[Roadrunner]

My garage thread still seems to be showing my linked images from Photobucket. Maybe I missed the upgrade.
Gahh I have over 500 photos in photobucket, most linking to this forum!

I sure won't be paying to link photos. This'll be the death of Photobucket I think.

[greenMachine]

As most will be aware/expect, this is making waves all over the interwebs. A lot of people are searching for an alternative free hosting service.

A word to the wise: read the T&C if that is what you are doing. I had a look at one that was being touted (Postimage), and I did not like theirs at all.

As mentioned above, I pay Smugmug for my hosting, and they make no claims on my copyright.

[KevGoat]

Now I know why some of your photos weren't showing up in my thread Lokiel - and I just had a quick look at your thread! Damn! One of the best threads on the forum and one I often refer back to for info and images!

This sucks!

When Google mucked up my cloud backed up images (about 5500 photos!) and stuffed my thread up, I started using imgur on recommendation from a few on here and have been ok so far - but who knows?

Hope something gets sorted so you (and others) can get threads back!

[Lokiel]

After many, many, many, many attempts at downloading all my albums from PB (getting spammed with Ads on every mouse-click and the pages regularly hanging because of all the Ads which meant I had to kill the browser and start the process all over again), I've managed to get all the photos and plan to move them to Imgur.

Why anyone would pay PB US$400 for 3rd-party hosting is beyond me, it's almost unusable!

I'd like to assist Okibi in trying to re-map the PB image names to the corresponding Imgur images.

If that doesn't work, I'll create a duplicate thread that does the same thing - just need the time.

[Roadrunner]

After many, many, many, many attempts at downloading all my albums from PB (getting spammed with Ads on every mouse-click and the pages regularly hanging because of all the Ads which meant I had to kill the browser and start the process all over again), I've managed to get all the photos and plan to move them to Imgur.

Why anyone would pay PB US$400 for 3rd-party hosting is beyond me, it's almost unusable!

I'd like to assist Okibi in trying to re-map the PB image names to the corresponding Imgur images.

If that doesn't work, I'll create a duplicate thread that does the same thing - just need the time.

Bugger, I was kinda hoping there was an easy "download all" button as I want to do the same. Did you have to individually download each photo one photo at a time?? I have nearly 1000 photos on PB I want to remove
Logged into PB today and can barely see the page for the pop ups and omg it's slow
Noticed my build thread is now also full of dead links. I'd be happy to sit down and re-link the correct images in my build thread when I get them hosted again, if editing the original post is possible.

[Lokiel]

You can download by album, photos in the album are compressed into a single archive file.
It's still painful because they pop up a window requiring you to click on squares in a photo that match a criteria so that they can verify you're not a robot (ie. a program that downloads files from their site).
Even this step hung my browser at times so it took bloody ages to download all my albums
PB is now one of the most miserable sites on the net to use with its "Ad diarrhea" and constant crashes - WHY WOULD ANYONE PAY FOR IT???

[KevGoat]

From the abundance of anti PB talk around the net I can't imagine them surviving. I hope it backfires really badly on them or other sites might just follow their lead

[billybunter]

i'd be doing well over 100 pages i'd have to hire some-one

[bruce]

I'm sure that photo bucket is still worth a few hundred mill.

[ManiacLachy]

Embedded Photobucket links take 1 of 2 formats. They can just be the IMG start/end tags, or they can be wrapped in a URL tag to make the picture link back to PB.

Would it be possible to have a script run that turns all Photobuck images/links into just an URL link to PB? Sure the picture won't show up, but a reader could open the photo in a new tab easily enough. Should be much easier than re-directing to alternate hosts.

[Lokiel]

Embedded Photobucket links take 1 of 2 formats. They can just be the IMG start/end tags, or they can be wrapped in a URL tag to make the picture link back to PB.

Would it be possible to have a script run that turns all Photobuck images/links into just an URL link to PB? Sure the picture won't show up, but a reader could open the photo in a new tab easily enough. Should be much easier than re-directing to alternate hosts.

On the weekend I wrote a Python script that "walked-through" the entire mx5cartalk site and extracted ALL Photobucket metadata into a .csv file (it created a very large .csv file and ran several hours overnight).
eg.

Code: Select all

Image File Name   Forum ID   Forum Title   Topic ID   Topic Title   Web Page   Photobucket Metadata
:
NAisBestshrunk.jpg   18   MX5 General Chat   16158   People's real names v forum names   http://mx5cartalk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=16158&start=180   <img src="http://i140.photobucket.com/albums/r27/TerenceCWWong/NAisBestshrunk.jpg" class="postimage" alt="Image" />
:
PistonDipstick.jpg   18   MX5 General Chat   53999   What have you done today/recently to your 5?   http://mx5cartalk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=53999&start=2640   <a href="http://s490.photobucket.com/user/1okie1/media/MX5_Garage/Miscellaneous/PistonDipstick.jpg.html" class="postlink"><img src="http://i490.photobucket.com/albums/rr263/1okie1/MX5_Garage/Miscellaneous/PistonDipstick.jpg" class="postimage" alt="Image" /></a>
:


- fields/columns are tab delimited.

I'm going to modify the script to generate additional fields/columns for the username who posted it and the post number within the forum topic so that it's easy to locate the post containing the Photobucket metadata (so that the post can be updated).

This will make it easy to break down into smaller .csv files per forum member who can then add an additional column "NewImageMetaData" that defines where the same file can be found on their alternate site. Hopefully this information can then be used to replace the "broken" PB metadata.

FYI: I copied all my PB photos to postimg.cc since:
1. postimg.cc doesn't mangle the image file name (makes it easy to ensure that the image file is correct since the file name is the same). The fact that the image file name is unmangled means I can write a script to automate the generation of the "NewImageMetaData" column from a file containing all my postimg.cc links.
2. postimg.cc was easy to get all the links within a folder (for dropbox image sharing, you need to explicitly share the link for every photo one at a time - way too many mouse-clicks needed when you have over 1,000 photos)
3. postimg.cc makes it easy to share the photo or thumbnail

postimg.cc is very basic though, no sub-folders or image editing (never used that last feature in PB anyway)