Photobucket Message on Signature Picture

[Feralpeg]

I've had the same picture in my signature for several years. Suddenly, there is a message over it about Photobucket. Color me confused. What do I need to do to get rid of this?

 

[NYCgrrl]

Do you have a paid photobucket account or free? If free it's close to impossible to share from the site anymore. I've years worth of pictures stored over there that are virtually stuck.

 

[Imzadi]

I've had the same picture in my signature for several years. Suddenly, there is a message over it about Photobucket. Color me confused. What do I need to do to get rid of this?

It's Photobucket's new way of extorting money. If you want your photos watermark free and not blurry, you have to PAY per month or year now.

 

[Imzadi]

Do you have a paid photobucket account or free? If free it's close to impossible to share from the site anymore. I've years worth of pictures stored over there that are virtually stuck.

Yep, me too. I have dozens of smilies there. It won't even let me in to download my own pics off their site so I can move them and store them elsewhere.

I've been wanting to move all my Pinterest photos too. As I'm sure one day, they will also want money for all the pics I've pinned and the personal notes I wrote on pins.

 

[Feralpeg]

Well, darn! I don't know if I still have that picture. I guess I'll update my signature! Thank you!

 

[NYCgrrl]

Yep, me too. I have dozens of smilies there. It won't even let me in to download my own pics off their site so I can move them and store them elsewhere.

I've been wanting to move all my Pinterest photos too. As I'm sure one day, they will also want money for all the pics I've pinned and the personal notes I wrote on pins.

I lost about a year of pictures during a techno disaster. The system ate that year's photos on the hard drive of my laptop and iPhone. Some are still at photo bucket and I thought up a way to get them back: take a new high resolution picture in the edit screen of photo bucket but have been foiled. The screen picture in edit mode is now wider than my monitor, sigh. Guess someday I'll just have to pay and be done.

 

[Imzadi]

The screen picture in edit mode is now wider than my monitor

Press Ctrl and - (dash or minus) buttons at the same time. Do it a few times if necessary. See if that will shrink down the photos so you can take a new pic. If you shrink down the page too far, click CTRL and + to enlarge the page again.

How do you do a high resolution pic? I usually do a screenshot of stuff. But, I don't think it's high resolution.

All my smilies are animated gifs like this:

So taking a photo isn't going to work. I have to download them in gif format. That takes forever. These smilies are special too. Not the generic ones typically out there. I think many of them will go extinct, now that most of us won't pay for Photobucket.

 

[low-key]

they got me a few years ago

 

[Meriweather]

I just copied a couple photos from there today. I had gotten the notice that they would be charging.......copied a few and deleted the rest. I haven't used them in years.
I had to confirm my email address every time I changed pages or did anything.....very annoying.
I store all my photos now on an external hard drive.

 

[NYCgrrl]

Press Ctrl and - (dash or minus) buttons at the same time. Do it a few times if necessary. See if that will shrink down the photos so you can take a new pic. If you shrink down the page too far, click CTRL and + to enlarge the page again.

How do you do a high resolution pic? I usually do a screenshot of stuff. But, I don't think it's high resolution.

I'll definitely give that a try! My sister is a camera buff and lent me one of her cameras preset with the proper settings (I know little about that stuff-it's her domain) I can ask her the particulars if you like.

 

[RangerPooh]

Thank you for the Photobucket update. I stopped using ages ago, but still had pictures there. I managed to log in and saved all of my pictures to access offline. My gosh my girls were tiny back then.

 

[BlueStarryHat]

I had a paid Photobucket account for years because I belong to several message boards and uploaded and shared lots of pics and gifs, and so it was a good move for me...until they took away a lot of the features I was paying for and upped the yearly fee to something so far out of my range it was akin to extortion. I had all of my photos on my hard drive and flash drives so I deleted all of my photos and basically told them where to go.

Now I use ImageShack, I have a paid account. It's supposed to be something like $45 a year, but they usually offer an incentive to get you to re-up so this year it only cost me $18.99 to renew for a year. I use photos and gifs a lot so it pays for me to have a paid account.

If you want to use a free service, maybe Google Photos would be a good fit for you. I use that when sharing photos from my Sims game with another board I belong to, it's pretty easy to use.

 

[NYCgrrl]

Thank you for the Photobucket update. I stopped using ages ago, but still had pictures there. I managed to log in and saved all of my pictures to access offline. My gosh my girls were tiny back then.

Any recollection on how you accomplished this? I'm a total techno dope so would appreciate the help.

 

[seshat0120]

It's Photobucket's new way of extorting money. If you want your photos watermark free and not blurry, you have to PAY per month or year now.

How is it extorting that they've chosen to now charge to use their service? I'll never understand why anyone thinks that a company should just give their services away for free and if they charge for it, it or so wrong and extorting money.

 

[declansdad]

How is it extorting that they've chosen to now charge to use their service? I'll never understand why anyone thinks that a company should just give their services away for free and if they charge for it, it or so wrong and extorting money.

In my case they continuously offered me storage for free. They then decided they weren't going to allow linking to the photos in places like here unless you paid, even though those links drove traffic to their site and increasing their advertising revenues. Now they want you to pay for something they gave me for free. They also removed the ability to download your albums to get within the tier system they now use.

To me that is extorting an existing client base. They want to charge, let them charge but do it to their new customers not their old customers.

 

[seshat0120]

I used Photobucket for many years (had a paid account at one time). I know exactly how they worked and what they now charge for. I still stand by my opinion that it's a sense of entitlement to expect a company to give you their service for free because you think they should.

 

[declansdad]

I used Photobucket for many years (had a paid account at one time). I know exactly how they worked and what they now charge for. I still stand by my opinion that it's a sense of entitlement to expect a company to give you their service for free because you think they should.

They thought they should, which is why I have the amount of images stored that there that I do. They can charge for if they want but don't make it so difficult for people to get their images off of their storage system.

 

[Feralpeg]

Is there any way to upload a picture to a DIS signature without the picture being hosted online?

 

[Imzadi]

How is it extorting that they've chosen to now charge to use their service? I'll never understand why anyone thinks that a company should just give their services away for free and if they charge for it, it or so wrong and extorting money.

It's extorting by the WAY they handled the changes. YES, they can take away their free services, but it would have been a consideration to their many members to have ALERTED us to the changes and given us a REASONABLE amount of time to move our photos and host /store them elsewhere.

INSTEAD, many thousands of us never received any notification, not on their own site, nor in any email that there was going to be changes. Many of us said we got no notification, all over the web. One day, we all woke up, powered up our computers and phones, went on the Internet and saw hundreds - thousands of these ugly gray boxes ADVERTING that if we want the pics seen, we need to PAY THE RANSOM at the address they are advertising:

Turns out the EUROPEAN UNION agrees with ME that it was extortion!!! They created and enacted some laws/regulations that went into effect some months after seeing those ransom boxes all over the web, about what 3rd parties can do. I don't have the specific wording. Basically 3rd parties MUST get our permission FIRST(and the web sites the photos show up on) before they can use their services for third party ADVERTISING - which is basically what Photobucket did, they HIJACKED our photos we posted all over the web, replaced it with ugly grey boxes ADVERTISING their third party hosting services.

Since Photobucket had too many pics all over the WORLD WIDE web, within hours of the EU laws, they had to unblock ALL our photos. They COULD have simply turned all the third party hosting OFF, except to paid members. They didn't do that.

NOR, did they tell us how long the unblocked photos will last. Do we still need to do something? Will they be staying, or do we still have to move the Finally, I got an email a couple months ago stating that I had too many photos for their FREE account of a limit of 25 mb. Then, when I tried to log in, it wouldn't let me into my account to move or delete them, without paying the monthly/yearly amount for their paid account. So again, my photos were held hostage & for ransom.

Two days ago, I get another email saying I only have 2 days left before they block all my photos - the photos I couldn't get into before to move. Thanks for finally sending me a notification.

NOW, it will let me log in, but it says I have 5 min to decide to pay the ransom for their premium account. Then it will, I guess, lock me out again. There IS a button to download my photos, but that takes longer than 5 minutes. So basically, I'm supposed to pay for, at least 1 month, to just get my photos out of there.

Again, they could have simply turned off the photo hosting. There would be NO photos showing up anywhere. Or just tiny Xs in teeny boxes showing where a photo should be. Instead, they now blurred out the photos and still have CLEAR wording that the photos are on Photobucket. "Advertising - but "not."

Have you been to Photobucket lately? Do you see the skeevy and scummy ads all over the place? I'm afraid to have my mouse on one of the porn ads and accidentally click on it, downloading some computer viruses, for more ransom ware. Why would I want to give my money to a place that advertises skeevy porn sites possibly filled with viruses? THIS is a legitimate, reputable business?

No. Not the way they didn't warn/prepare us for changes. Not the way they did it in an underhanded way. Not the way they used all the photos for ransom advertising. Not the way they keep their site running through extorting some who don't know how to move their pics or don't have the time & energy to move them. And NO, not the way they get other moneys by advertising skeevy porn sites that may be full of viruses.



(BTW, seshat0120, all my yelling isn't directed at you. Just at Photobucket & their tactics.)

 

[Imzadi]

Many people moved their photos to TinyPic.com. I warned them on another thread that TinyPic is owned by Photobucket. On
Jul 18, 2019, according to a notification on their website, TinyPic is shutting down their website at some point in 2019, and they say that the reason they are shutting it down is because the ever-dwindling ad revenue is no longer enough to support a free image host.

Well it's now gone. Now there are all these photos all over the web:

Many others moved theirs to Flickr, which I said was recently sold from Yahoo to Verizon. The jury is still out on what changes may be ahead at Flickr.

I also said, I'm leery of Imgur. They have a lot of rules in their terms of service. And with so many people using them, especially now that people have jumped ship from Photobucket, I have to wonder how long it will be before they get the financial strain of too many members using them as a 3rd party site host too?