6 ms·

Photobucket limits displaying of images on external sites to $40/month plan

64 points by Doctor_Fegg 9y ago

austenallred 9y ago
What a great way to simultaneously make a quick buck and kill your company.
DigitalSea 9y ago
I forgot that Photobucket even existed, with far more superior choices like Google Photos and Dropbox existing. This is insane, RIP Photobucket.
- schitzapplebits 9y ago
  What about imgur?
  - boyce 9y ago
    Only a matter of time before they do something about hotlinking. Direct image links now redirect to tell you to download their app, I'd be surprised if they didn't start watermarking embedded images or putting ads on them. Reddit hosting images on their own site haven't helped imgur
    - cube00 9y ago
      The 'open in app' also helpfully floats over the image on mobile with a nice narrow area to close the floating popup, oh look the store has just opened for me to download the imgur app again, if only they under stood by clicking X I'm never going to want your app.
    - DavidBuchanan 9y ago
      I wrote a simple extension to disable the new direct image link behaviour: https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/imgur-anti-anti-hotlink https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/imgur-anti-anti-hotlink
  - zeveb 9y ago
    I consider imgur a poor choice because it doesn't work with JavaScript disabled (dunno how Drive, Dropbox or Photobucket do, just that imgur breaks). It's in the business of serving JPEGs and HTML containing <img> tags pointing to JPEGs; to break that HTML such that those JPEGs don't serve is failing to deliver on its core business. Sure, use JavaScript to implement infinite scrolling or on-demand loading, but fall back to usable pure HTML.
    - cerved 9y ago
      I'm confused. Which part doesn't work without js, the hosting or uploading?
gizmo 9y ago
How is this ransom? You just have to pay money to use their service. $35 a month isn't a lot of money for anything remotely serious. Also, photobucket has a $10 a month plan for up to 100GB of image storage that supports "unlimited linking". Most forums won't need more than that. Nothing about this pricing page looks extortionate to me: http://photobucket.com/pricing http://photobucket.com/pricing Maybe I'm missing something important here, but to me it looks like some people have a very rigid view of what online services ought to cost.
- mpeg 9y ago
  You could pay amazon $35 a month for 100GB storage and about 70m hits per month, or 27req/s sustained for your images... At more usual numbers of a few million hits per month, cut that by 10x or so
  - gizmo 9y ago
    And a 2nd hand 200GB hard drive from ebay costs 5 bucks. That's not comparable though, because Photobucket offers many image related services. Maybe forum operators aren't interested any of those services and they should be using a dumb storage provider instead.
    - jsjohnst 9y ago
      It's not forum operators using Photobucket. It's the user of the forum.
      - mpeg 9y ago
        I wasn't really trying to compare photobucket and s3 feature wise anyway, just highlighting that the price is completely out of proportion for the cost to host and distribute those images even with a cloud provider.
- tyingq 9y ago
  They probably consider it ransom because the terms were changed after the relationship was established. Unlimited linking probably doesn't include embedding. So, if they were on a lower end plan, something that used to be offered was taken away. After they invested time in uploading and embedding lots of images.
CorpOverreach 9y ago
I've been seeing this the past week on a lot of forums that I still frequent. There's one particular car forum where I've been following a guy for the past three years doing a project car build. 80+ pages on the thread, with hundreds of images. Now they're blocked. Several other big threads suffered similar fates. Needless to say, none of them have any plans on paying up $400 to Photobucket. The real loss here is the potential loss of history - many niche forums have 15+ years of history on them, a lot of it in the form of how-to guides, FAQs, etc about things you won't find in any manual.
- _delirium 9y ago
  In addition to Photobucket, Dropbox disabled (after some advance warning) its former Public folder feature in March this year, which killed another big chunk of embedded images in old forum threads. That one can be worked around without paying anything by converting the old public folders to "shared" folders with the sharing permissions set public, and then going back and editing the old forum threads to point to the new image URLs, but as you can imagine a pretty small percentage of people are going to do that for old threads.
- vbezhenar 9y ago
  Forum should download and host linked images. External links are not reliable and it's not the first incident.
  - tyingq 9y ago
    That's technically a good idea, but also exposes you to a bunch of DMCA problems if you don't limit it to known image hosts. Not that the requests would be legitimate, but it's still a nuisance.
    - AndrewStephens 9y ago
      You are exposed to the DMCA whether you host the images yourself of not.
- tedmiston 9y ago
userbinator 9y ago
It's really $400 for the privilege of allowing you to send an arbitrary Referer: header with every request, no? ;-) Sometimes I've run into a similar issue where links I post work fine for me but others have complained that they could only be accessed by copy-pasting into a new window. Those with their browsers' referers disabled or same-domain-only have probably encountered this before. More fun is to "fake" the referer header by configuring your filtering proxy to always send the one the site expects. I suppose, like adblocking, once users smarten up to it and/or browsers disable referers by default, this sort of ridiculousness will slowly fade away or change. Edit: I can confirm this Proxomitron filter works to make all the images show up in the linked forum thread: In = FALSE Out = TRUE Key = "Referer: photoFucket" URL = "*.photobucket.com" Match = "*" Replace = "http://www.photobucket.com/"
- benguild 9y ago
  Can't you just put the image in an <iframe> with <meta name="referrer" content="no-referrer" /> on?
  - IshKebab 9y ago
    No. Think about where photobucket is used.
    - userbinator 9y ago
      Also, just turning off the referer doesn't work for Photobucket --- you need to send it the right one.
briandear 9y ago
Photo-who? I thought this article was from 2006 or something. If it’s true that any publicity is good publicity, I guess this is one way to get it.
jk563 9y ago
More accurately, Photobucket has a $399.99 tier, and this is the only tier which allows using them as a third party host for images embedded on other sites. Images belonging to an account that is not on this tier well get replaced with an image indicating the feature needs unlocking.
- westcoastflea1 9y ago
  and that means for people who use these images on ebay all that work is lost i can get all my photos it is the work involved in putting the right photos in the right listing i might as well start over from scratch it would take more time to do that then to make new listings
ckastner 9y ago
The title is a bit ambiguous to me, so to be clear: the $400 are to activate the service, without which a placeholder image will be displayed instead. It's not "oh, you hotlinked one of our images, now pay $400". (I'm not defending either practice.)
- colinbartlett 9y ago
  The author implies that without the higher plan you can't even export an archive of your files, making it extremely difficult to migrate to a competing service instead of paying the fee (for a month at least). That seems like the more egregious practice.
revmoo 9y ago
Hilarious. Image host forgets their place--will learn it immediately.
throwaway2016a 9y ago
I think it is completely reasonable to charge for hot linking. There are only two problems: - Hot-linking seems to be one of the main use cases people have for their service so they are disabling a use case that people have relied on for years (making a free service no longer free is always harder than charging from day one) - This is significantly more expensive to most people than just using AWS S3 or similar. It's just one easy to write / follow AWS tutorial or micro-app away from being obsolete.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
tedmiston 9y ago
Imgur has been around for a long time now, and their terms allow hotlinking on forums. Clearly consumers aren't going to pay $400/year for this feature. Why does anyone still use Photobucket?
- signal11 9y ago
  There was a story[1] a few days ago about how imgur was becoming more annoying and obtrusive in the face of Reddit's new image hosting features. Ultimately, for image hosting (like everything else) there's no free lunch. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14595212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14595212
- chippy 9y ago
  It's possible that Imgur will, when it gets as old as Photobucket, change their terms and start charging more. Will we expect people in tech forums in the future to be writing "What does anyone still use Imgur?" The answer to both the future and the present questions is that they have been using it in the past (inertia) and have not moved their thousands of images (cost/pain).
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
ransom1538 9y ago
This will be a big hit to old forums. I think phpbb allows you to just set a image with link [link] in a post. So, in your phpbb database you would have some link like: http://photobucket.cdn.etc./32328hio/image.jpg http://photobucket.cdn.etc./32328hio/image.jpg hard coded into the table. [links] would have never been in the album like the OP suggests downloading. They need a quick python script to locate links, upload the contents, replace the url (all using google images, s3 etc).
- tyingq 9y ago
  I'd probably implement that as a "forever caching" image proxy hosted on a subdomain of my forum domain, plus the batch/live domain replacement for the database. Then it also works for future attempts to embed photobucket images, and doesn't require downloading all the existing images at once.
AndrewStephens 9y ago
Photobucket are within their rights to do this but it is really sad that so much of the message board culture is inaccessible because popular free image hosts tend to go away after a few years. I would lay money that 90% of posts over 10 years old have broken images. The moral of the story is for forums to host images themselves, but nobody wants to do that because: a) uploading files is annoying to implement and exposes the forum to security issues b) storing the files can take a huge amount of disk space c) serving the files can take a huge amount of bandwidth d) the first message board to allow uploading files would just become a huge dumping ground of images for other boards to link to, necessitating implementing a referer block just like Photobucket Personally I think that the message board developers have really dropped the ball by refusing to implement a really bullet-proof solution into their software by default. It is a hard problem but the only real solution is to host the images yourself. Third-parties are always going to let you down eventually because their goals do not align with yours.
- mason240 9y ago
  e) you have to self-police against CP and terrorist groups using your servers to host their illegal content.
  - kevindqc 9y ago
    Can you get charged if that happens? Sure you were hosting it, but you didn't know? Do you really have to look at all the pictures? What about privacy?
- CM30 9y ago
  Sorry for the late reply, but forums do allow you to upload your own images. Every modern script (both paid and free) has an attachment feature or a gallery add on you can use with it. However, this isn't the best for the actual users, because: 1. Most forums disable hotlinking for obvious reasons. So if they upload an image to a forum, they'll then have to do the same thing for every other forum they post it on. 2. Forums often require users to register to see attachments, so the images are either invisible or reduced to tiny thumbnails for guests. Stuff like Imgur and Photobucket got popular because people could post an image once and use the same URL lots of times knowing anyone could see it. But yeah, forums do host images themselves and have for about a decade or so. Very few have problems with disc space, bandwidth or illegal content either, I know since I've run them for years without issue.
ComputerGuru 9y ago
PhotoBucket lost my trust a long time ago. What will we do when Imgur stops growing and investors push them to make money off their content? https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/what-happens-when-imgur-goes-out-of-business/ https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/what-happens-when-imgur-goes-... All these companies burn through investor money, have no real profit making business plan, bank off being the most popular image hosting site of the day/month/year, then capitulate and turn to dark practices and extortion to make a buck, leaving room for another darling startup to take their place. Rinse and repeat.
spurlock 9y ago
In the meantime, just use bukk.it for memes: https://bukk.it https://bukk.it
cobyoijaix 9y ago
We are working on a tool to transfer photos to Imgur easily (even replacing old links). Interested? Write to cobyoijaix(at)yandex(dot)com.
westcoastflea1 9y ago
yes ive been hosting images on photobucket for years with links to my ebay listings some listings with 12 links to photobucket and to have all those links broken (3 years of work) unless i suddenly pay photobucket 40.00 a month is extortion and could possibly ruin my business

64 points by Doctor_Fegg 9y ago

What a great way to simultaneously make a quick buck and kill your company.

I forgot that Photobucket even existed, with far more superior choices like Google Photos and Dropbox existing. This is insane, RIP Photobucket.

schitzapplebits 9y ago
What about imgur?
- boyce 9y ago
  Only a matter of time before they do something about hotlinking. Direct image links now redirect to tell you to download their app, I'd be surprised if they didn't start watermarking embedded images or putting ads on them. Reddit hosting images on their own site haven't helped imgur
  - cube00 9y ago
    The 'open in app' also helpfully floats over the image on mobile with a nice narrow area to close the floating popup, oh look the store has just opened for me to download the imgur app again, if only they under stood by clicking X I'm never going to want your app.
  - DavidBuchanan 9y ago
    I wrote a simple extension to disable the new direct image link behaviour: https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/imgur-anti-anti-hotlink https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/imgur-anti-anti-hotlink
- zeveb 9y ago
  I consider imgur a poor choice because it doesn't work with JavaScript disabled (dunno how Drive, Dropbox or Photobucket do, just that imgur breaks). It's in the business of serving JPEGs and HTML containing <img> tags pointing to JPEGs; to break that HTML such that those JPEGs don't serve is failing to deliver on its core business. Sure, use JavaScript to implement infinite scrolling or on-demand loading, but fall back to usable pure HTML.
  - cerved 9y ago
    I'm confused. Which part doesn't work without js, the hosting or uploading?

gizmo 9y ago

How is this ransom? You just have to pay money to use their service. $35 a month isn't a lot of money for anything remotely serious. Also, photobucket has a $10 a month plan for up to 100GB of image storage that supports "unlimited linking". Most forums won't need more than that. Nothing about this pricing page looks extortionate to me: http://photobucket.com/pricing http://photobucket.com/pricing Maybe I'm missing something important here, but to me it looks like some people have a very rigid view of what online services ought to cost.

mpeg 9y ago
You could pay amazon $35 a month for 100GB storage and about 70m hits per month, or 27req/s sustained for your images... At more usual numbers of a few million hits per month, cut that by 10x or so
- gizmo 9y ago
  And a 2nd hand 200GB hard drive from ebay costs 5 bucks. That's not comparable though, because Photobucket offers many image related services. Maybe forum operators aren't interested any of those services and they should be using a dumb storage provider instead.
  - jsjohnst 9y ago
    It's not forum operators using Photobucket. It's the user of the forum.
    - mpeg 9y ago
      I wasn't really trying to compare photobucket and s3 feature wise anyway, just highlighting that the price is completely out of proportion for the cost to host and distribute those images even with a cloud provider.
tyingq 9y ago
They probably consider it ransom because the terms were changed after the relationship was established. Unlimited linking probably doesn't include embedding. So, if they were on a lower end plan, something that used to be offered was taken away. After they invested time in uploading and embedding lots of images.

CorpOverreach 9y ago

I've been seeing this the past week on a lot of forums that I still frequent. There's one particular car forum where I've been following a guy for the past three years doing a project car build. 80+ pages on the thread, with hundreds of images. Now they're blocked. Several other big threads suffered similar fates. Needless to say, none of them have any plans on paying up $400 to Photobucket. The real loss here is the potential loss of history - many niche forums have 15+ years of history on them, a lot of it in the form of how-to guides, FAQs, etc about things you won't find in any manual.

_delirium 9y ago
In addition to Photobucket, Dropbox disabled (after some advance warning) its former Public folder feature in March this year, which killed another big chunk of embedded images in old forum threads. That one can be worked around without paying anything by converting the old public folders to "shared" folders with the sharing permissions set public, and then going back and editing the old forum threads to point to the new image URLs, but as you can imagine a pretty small percentage of people are going to do that for old threads.
vbezhenar 9y ago
Forum should download and host linked images. External links are not reliable and it's not the first incident.
- tyingq 9y ago
  That's technically a good idea, but also exposes you to a bunch of DMCA problems if you don't limit it to known image hosts. Not that the requests would be legitimate, but it's still a nuisance.
  - AndrewStephens 9y ago
    You are exposed to the DMCA whether you host the images yourself of not.
tedmiston 9y ago

userbinator 9y ago

It's really $400 for the privilege of allowing you to send an arbitrary Referer: header with every request, no? ;-) Sometimes I've run into a similar issue where links I post work fine for me but others have complained that they could only be accessed by copy-pasting into a new window. Those with their browsers' referers disabled or same-domain-only have probably encountered this before. More fun is to "fake" the referer header by configuring your filtering proxy to always send the one the site expects. I suppose, like adblocking, once users smarten up to it and/or browsers disable referers by default, this sort of ridiculousness will slowly fade away or change. Edit: I can confirm this Proxomitron filter works to make all the images show up in the linked forum thread: In = FALSE Out = TRUE Key = "Referer: photoFucket" URL = "*.photobucket.com" Match = "*" Replace = "http://www.photobucket.com/"

benguild 9y ago
Can't you just put the image in an <iframe> with <meta name="referrer" content="no-referrer" /> on?
- IshKebab 9y ago
  No. Think about where photobucket is used.
  - userbinator 9y ago
    Also, just turning off the referer doesn't work for Photobucket --- you need to send it the right one.

briandear 9y ago

Photo-who? I thought this article was from 2006 or something. If it’s true that any publicity is good publicity, I guess this is one way to get it.

jk563 9y ago

More accurately, Photobucket has a $399.99 tier, and this is the only tier which allows using them as a third party host for images embedded on other sites. Images belonging to an account that is not on this tier well get replaced with an image indicating the feature needs unlocking.

westcoastflea1 9y ago
and that means for people who use these images on ebay all that work is lost i can get all my photos it is the work involved in putting the right photos in the right listing i might as well start over from scratch it would take more time to do that then to make new listings

ckastner 9y ago

The title is a bit ambiguous to me, so to be clear: the $400 are to activate the service, without which a placeholder image will be displayed instead. It's not "oh, you hotlinked one of our images, now pay $400". (I'm not defending either practice.)

colinbartlett 9y ago
The author implies that without the higher plan you can't even export an archive of your files, making it extremely difficult to migrate to a competing service instead of paying the fee (for a month at least). That seems like the more egregious practice.

revmoo 9y ago

Hilarious. Image host forgets their place--will learn it immediately.

throwaway2016a 9y ago

I think it is completely reasonable to charge for hot linking. There are only two problems: - Hot-linking seems to be one of the main use cases people have for their service so they are disabling a use case that people have relied on for years (making a free service no longer free is always harder than charging from day one) - This is significantly more expensive to most people than just using AWS S3 or similar. It's just one easy to write / follow AWS tutorial or micro-app away from being obsolete.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

tedmiston 9y ago

Imgur has been around for a long time now, and their terms allow hotlinking on forums. Clearly consumers aren't going to pay $400/year for this feature. Why does anyone still use Photobucket?

signal11 9y ago
There was a story[1] a few days ago about how imgur was becoming more annoying and obtrusive in the face of Reddit's new image hosting features. Ultimately, for image hosting (like everything else) there's no free lunch. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14595212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14595212
chippy 9y ago
It's possible that Imgur will, when it gets as old as Photobucket, change their terms and start charging more. Will we expect people in tech forums in the future to be writing "What does anyone still use Imgur?" The answer to both the future and the present questions is that they have been using it in the past (inertia) and have not moved their thousands of images (cost/pain).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

ransom1538 9y ago

This will be a big hit to old forums. I think phpbb allows you to just set a image with link [link] in a post. So, in your phpbb database you would have some link like: http://photobucket.cdn.etc./32328hio/image.jpg http://photobucket.cdn.etc./32328hio/image.jpg hard coded into the table. [links] would have never been in the album like the OP suggests downloading. They need a quick python script to locate links, upload the contents, replace the url (all using google images, s3 etc).

tyingq 9y ago
I'd probably implement that as a "forever caching" image proxy hosted on a subdomain of my forum domain, plus the batch/live domain replacement for the database. Then it also works for future attempts to embed photobucket images, and doesn't require downloading all the existing images at once.

AndrewStephens 9y ago

Photobucket are within their rights to do this but it is really sad that so much of the message board culture is inaccessible because popular free image hosts tend to go away after a few years. I would lay money that 90% of posts over 10 years old have broken images. The moral of the story is for forums to host images themselves, but nobody wants to do that because: a) uploading files is annoying to implement and exposes the forum to security issues b) storing the files can take a huge amount of disk space c) serving the files can take a huge amount of bandwidth d) the first message board to allow uploading files would just become a huge dumping ground of images for other boards to link to, necessitating implementing a referer block just like Photobucket Personally I think that the message board developers have really dropped the ball by refusing to implement a really bullet-proof solution into their software by default. It is a hard problem but the only real solution is to host the images yourself. Third-parties are always going to let you down eventually because their goals do not align with yours.

mason240 9y ago
e) you have to self-police against CP and terrorist groups using your servers to host their illegal content.
- kevindqc 9y ago
  Can you get charged if that happens? Sure you were hosting it, but you didn't know? Do you really have to look at all the pictures? What about privacy?
CM30 9y ago
Sorry for the late reply, but forums do allow you to upload your own images. Every modern script (both paid and free) has an attachment feature or a gallery add on you can use with it. However, this isn't the best for the actual users, because: 1. Most forums disable hotlinking for obvious reasons. So if they upload an image to a forum, they'll then have to do the same thing for every other forum they post it on. 2. Forums often require users to register to see attachments, so the images are either invisible or reduced to tiny thumbnails for guests. Stuff like Imgur and Photobucket got popular because people could post an image once and use the same URL lots of times knowing anyone could see it. But yeah, forums do host images themselves and have for about a decade or so. Very few have problems with disc space, bandwidth or illegal content either, I know since I've run them for years without issue.

ComputerGuru 9y ago

PhotoBucket lost my trust a long time ago. What will we do when Imgur stops growing and investors push them to make money off their content? https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/what-happens-when-imgur-goes-out-of-business/ https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/what-happens-when-imgur-goes-... All these companies burn through investor money, have no real profit making business plan, bank off being the most popular image hosting site of the day/month/year, then capitulate and turn to dark practices and extortion to make a buck, leaving room for another darling startup to take their place. Rinse and repeat.

spurlock 9y ago

In the meantime, just use bukk.it for memes: https://bukk.it https://bukk.it

cobyoijaix 9y ago

We are working on a tool to transfer photos to Imgur easily (even replacing old links). Interested? Write to cobyoijaix(at)yandex(dot)com.

westcoastflea1 9y ago

yes ive been hosting images on photobucket for years with links to my ebay listings some listings with 12 links to photobucket and to have all those links broken (3 years of work) unless i suddenly pay photobucket 40.00 a month is extortion and could possibly ruin my business