Kicking the Photobucket

[tealin]

Well, all good things must come to an end ...

The image hosting site I've been using for this blog since 2004 has suddenly gone full rapacious jerk, and decided to charge over ten times its original pro fee for the privilege of embedding one's images in third-party sites, i.e. what I do here. As I'm grandfathered in from my last payment, I have slightly under a year to figure out what to do with the thousands of images I've accrued over the years, update img tags, etc., but frankly right now I'm looking at it all and going 'uuuuuuuuurrrghhhhh'. Such an awful lot going on this year, and now this on top of it, and for what?

Since 2013 or so, I've mainly been embedding images from Tumblr, which is also dying but might have a few years left at least; I ought to get another image hoster but I haven't found any I like as much as Photobucket, so if you have a suggestion that's not Picasa/Google I'd love to hear it.

Comments

[frith]

I use Flickr. I have multiple accounts since they _used_ to limit the free ones to 200 images. Now it's unlimited. The advantage of having an old account is that I can ignore their requests for a cel phone number when signing up (I don't have a cel phone) and I just use my account name, not an email address. Flickr has not coerced me to change my password either. The disadvantage of Flickr is that it doesn't host gif images, and in the past, PNG images have not worked well there (they have probably fixed that). For gif images I use either LiveJournal or the Dreamwidth image gallery, both free.

[boji]

Just wanted to say I know exactly how you feel.

My adfree PB account is still hot linking / third party hosting and will be until October, I assume, when paid time runs out. I have about 1,000 images to download and am having to do this manually as the downloader option from PB is borked. I assume that's on purpose btw. I basically write meta/reviews. Each has approx two embedded images within it. So, one hell of a lot of work to swap out the image links to reconstitute my blog. *sigh*

I would reactivate automated renewal on PB if I could be sure third-party housing would work after October. T&C makes it pretty clear only plus accounts will be grandfathered.

Am both peeved and gutted.

[cameoflage]

I guess Imgur would work? It's so ubiquitous that I assume you had a reason not to list it, though. If not that, Flickr seems adequate.

[brewsternorth]

Uuuuugh. Flickr might work in the interim at least, but has the disadvantage like Tumblr of being owned by the Yahoo! bunch. I wonder how difficult it would be to set up and run one's own domain to host photos just to cut out the middlebeing?

[tealin]

Setting it up and running it would be relatively simple; the question is bandwidth. While Tumblr has taken a lot of that burden in recent years, I have enough images that just enough traffic hits bandwidth limits – that was why I went pro on Photobucket.