9 ms·
Want your images back? That'll be $5
- calc_exe 4mo ago[dead]
- joaquincabezas 4mo ago5 dollars for having that story to tell, not bad
- lutr 4mo agoYeah. To be fair I'm not that mad about it. It was a very poetic moment that I'll forever cherish...
- echoangle 4mo agoJust do a GDPR request and get all the data they have on you for free. I’m pretty sure they would have to give you your photos as part of that.
- lutr 4mo agoWell... If I was smarter, I'd have definitely done that!
- petcat 4mo agoAren't they only required to delete the data on request? They don't have to actually provide it back to you
- echoangle 4mo agoThey have to provide the data on request. I also think they aren’t allowed to delete any data they have when you request it before providing it (although you can of course also request deletion). https://gdpr-info.eu/art-15-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-15-gdpr/
- flexagoon 4mo agoNo, you can request your personal data as a part of GDPR (and most other privacy laws). That's why things like Google Takeout still exist.
- Hnrobert42 4mo agoIANAL. Article 15 says you have the right to request the data and they must provide it to you. Article 20 says you have the right to get your photos back in a machine readable format. Sadly, this only applies to those in the EU. Americans can keep taking it, which makes sense as it's an American company that's giving it. Sigh.
- echoangle 4mo agoHonestly I would just try doing a GDPR request and see what happens. They first have to find out if you’re from the EU, and they probably will err on the side of caution and just fulfill it.
- swiftcoder 4mo ago> They first have to find out if you’re from the EU Technically, you don't have to be from the EU. You just need to be in the EU (which includes Americans who are just vacationing in the EU).
- echoangle 4mo agoActually when reading up more on it, it looks like you don’t have to be in the EU at all. If I understand it correctly, the GDPR applies to any company that does business in the EU and it doesn’t even matter where the data subject is located or which country they are a citizen in. So even if you’re from the US, you should be able to make a valid GDPR request.
- andiareso 4mo agoMinnesota and some other states have similar laws that basically mirror GDPR. States have forms you can get that you would submit to the company. I’ve done it for my Matterport data after they started making you pay to unarchive content (originally free)
- hk__2 4mo agoAre photos considered PII?
- datenwolf 4mo agoGDPR covers more than just PII.
- mananaysiempre 4mo agoPII is a US-specific concept that has little relevance to the GDPR. So I wouldn’t say for sure that they have to give those photos to you but it wouldn’t be as simple as “not PII”.
- echoangle 4mo agoNot in general, but depending on what’s on them maybe. A profile picture showing my face definitely is. But I’m also not sure that they only have to give you PII.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- GJim 4mo agoUmmmm The GDPR also covers data portability, so preventing your data (not just personal data) from being held hostage. https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/individual-rights/individual-rights/right-to-data-portability/ https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
- dawnerd 4mo agoCould also say you’re a California resident and get your data too. They’ll probably just ignore or say no if they’re being that shady.
- justinclift 4mo agoThat's pretty deceptive conduct on Photobucket's part. $5 recovery in small claims court maybe? :)
- lutr 4mo agoWould be a nice part 2 :P. But I've already had enough with this "side mission". Maybe I'll try a charge back and see if that works, though.
- equinoxnemesis 4mo agoConsidering they explicitly said they had some photos of yours ("You shared them. We protected them."), this seems like chargeback territory.
- lutr 4mo agoRight?? I mean again, I could have gotten a refund in 48 hours, per the smallprint... But I noticed it about ~3 months too late, while writing about this. But it's okay. Getting those $5 back would make Photobucket look slightly better in my mind, and I don't want that.
- uberex 4mo agoYou can charge back months after. Best to ask for refund first (as in now, despite their legally irrelevant time limit) as the CC would expect you to do that first.
- lutr 4mo agoHuh, never did a charge back in my life (I'm not from the US, charge backs aren't a big thing here). I'll give it a shot, just for fun :). I use a debit card and I wasn't even sure you can do charge backs with them. But yes, apparently!
- inigyou 4mo agoIt's not an automatic thing. The bank has to review your case and decide if photobucket committed fraud. But the odds are higher than you think.
- voidUpdate 4mo agoI've done a couple on a debit card and it's gone pretty smoothly. I paid around £200 for an online service who they effectively ghosted me, so I submitted a chargeback to my bank, and they said they'd get in contact with the provider. I never heard back about it other than getting my money so I'm guessing they ghosted my bank too
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- inigyou 4mo agoEvery time I see one of these I make a note that it's a successful strategy to make money, so I might apply it in a future project.
- varun_ch 4mo agoThe world would be a better place if you made money by providing value to people. Instead of extorting them.
- inigyou 4mo agoDon't you value your childhood photos?
- varun_ch 4mo agoIf I trusted my friend to hold onto my childhood photo collection as a favor, and then came back to find him asking for $5 to return it, and I reluctantly agree only to find him empty handed, I wouldn't consider that providing value.
- inigyou 4mo agoThis is why you're not a billionaire.
- okramcivokram 4mo agoI have received the email that my photobucket account is going to be deleted, so I've logged in after who knows how many years and got offered the same thing, to subscribe. Instead I've went to close the account and in the process (or somewhere else, don't remember exactly) there was an option to first download all the data which I've used and got the images back (there were just a few as I haven't used the service really), then I've closed the account. There was no need to subscribe.
- lutr 4mo agoYeah, makes sense. I think it's just a little honeypot for fools that don't do their research. 1 prompt to Claude would have saved me the pain, probably. ("Research" isn't even that hard nowadays!)
- trwhite 4mo agoOr maybe... you know... read
- uberex 4mo agothe whole part about dark patterns is to be technically not doing the asshole thing while getting most people to fall for it.
- lutr 4mo agoIt's true, doing things carefully can avoid a ton of problems in life. I guess I wasn't expecting to have to use my full attention for a little "side mission". And I'd already made peace with losing those $5. "It's time to relive them for just $5" didn't really sound like you can get them back, in my defense.
- root-parent 4mo agoI predict that in the future, when you cancel an LLM subscription, they will threaten that unless you pay, to fully delete your anonymized chats, they will be public as paid training data. You know ...that is how we managed to offer you such a cheap subscription...
- jadar 4mo agoWow, shocker, a company will not indefinitely store your data for free.
- gchamonlive 4mo agoIt was happy to use it to make profit though...
- echoangle 4mo agoWell they did store it for free, they are just holding it hostage. They didn’t say “pay or we’ll delete it”, they said “pay if you want it” and they’ll probably continue to store it for free continuously until you pay.
- dexterdog 4mo agoNot only that, but there is a cost for retrieval and transmission especially if you are in cold storage. It's much cheaper to just mark it for deletion than it is to get it back.
- lutr 4mo agoIf it was just that, I'd be okay-ish with it (even though it started out as a service). But pushing a monthly subscription for a 1-time action? Man.....
- sneak 4mo agoYou just described most app purchases these days, sadly. [k]
- xp84 4mo agoIf it requires nothing more than a click to cancel, it seems like you'd be happier in life if you viewed such a thing as merely a two-step process (signup, get what you need, cancel immediately) rather than a serious commitment to spend $5 a month for the rest of your life. Unfortunately, everyone in business is now required to do this 'wishful thinking' that people will commit to everything. I laugh sometimes at items that Amazon hilariously suggests that I "Subscribe & Save" to! When signup is one click, and cancellation requires a phone call... then I'm right there with you with the pitchforks!
- carlosjobim 4mo agoPhotobucket sent me multiple e-mails during a long time period to alert me about this change. So the author quite willfully ignored those.
- lutr 4mo agoThey must have sent them to me too. However, the Photobucket account was registered using an e-mail address I no longer use. I found the account by accident, by scrolling through my password manager. The e-mail account was fully emptied after 1 year of inactivity (with warnings and what not, to other addresses I stopped using). So Photobucket was way nicer than Yahoo from this point of view!
- MarkusWandel 4mo agoYou have to view all cloud storage - all free cloud storage anyway - as ephemeral. If you want your childhood pictures to survive, store them someplace you have control over.
- sneak 4mo agoPeople uploaded photos to Photobucket 20 years ago, before anyone knew this. This smug take is not the least bit helpful in this instance.
- mindslight 4mo agoMany knew this 20 years ago, as well.
- inigyou 4mo agoNobody knew it 20 years ago. SaaS was just taking off. The word "cloud" was barely a thing.
- defrost 4mo agoSome of us started coding and archiving data 40+ years ago, many of us were suspicious of cloud storage from the get go and have never relied on it as primary storage and still keep multiple location physical backups regional and under direct control of stakeholders.
- hamburgererror 4mo agoWhy store "childhood memories" on an online service though? Those websites get hacked all the time, you're lucky if your privates pictures don't endup in the wrong hands...
- lutr 4mo agoAh, no, by "childhood memories" I meant like whatever I was screnshotting as a kid. Believe it or not, but finding old screenshots like 10 years later is sooo sweet! For my actual chilhood photos, I'm using a little self-hosted Immich that's nicely backed up as well. Hoping that doesn't get hacked!
- mannanj 4mo agoThere’s a emphasis and repetition of sound bites and empty words in our culture, as though they mean something clear and understandable though it’s really a sound bite and a phrase to ease your discomfort and help you feel better about yourself: corporate greed is one of those words. There is no such thing as a corporation being conscious or taking a will of its own and choosing to be greedy. It’s just a symbol to represent humans being greedy. Let’s call it what it is: it’s human leaders and bourgeois people being greedy. I don’t find it honest when we continue to use inaccurate phrases in this deceptive manner since we don’t want to look at the situation for what it really is. Or assume our responsibility in the matter. We’ve allowed this greed by tolerating it, interacting with the humans (or not) and pretending the reality isn’t what it is. What is complaining and stopping there asking about it? Surely we can do more than just make an internet article about it and think it will change.
- pixl97 4mo agoTolerating it? No! Greed is good. We've grown this monster from a pup and now it's all grown up and eating people.
- mannanj 3mo agoWell I don't think it was you or I who did that. It was bourgeois class of people and their descendants convincing a gullible, naive and sick class of people to believe their lies. Their lies are the monster that was grown by them and by people unable to doubt the evidence.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- selimonder 4mo agoWow this is a next level scam lol
- psychoslave 4mo agoSo, like and a kind reminder they have legal obligation to give all the personal data they have about you under Europeans laws, and that's it?
- nekusar 4mo agoChargeback time. They claimed to have your photos, then fucking lied about it. And a chargeback costs them like $20.
- joshstrange 4mo agoIf ever there was a use-case for chargebacks, this is it. Threaten their support to refund or you will file a chargeback, and then file one if they refuse.
- calc_exe 4mo agoExactly. And I wouldn't threaten the chargeback. If they refuse the refund or ignore you, then just file a chargeback. To me, ideally the end result is a chargeback instead a customer support refund. Otherwise they have no incentive to change. A high chargeback percentage could be that incentive. I think the credit card companies expect you to attempt to talk it out with the merchant first though, so you'd still want to reach out to customer support first to "give them a chance".
- joshstrange 4mo agoThat's fair and the practices here do allow for immediate chargeback in my book. My suggestion for reaching out to support comes mostly from being on the other end of chargebacks and being frustrated when that's the first/only tool people reach for. Chargebacks don't tell the full story, telling support "Hey you told me to pay $5 to see my pictures but there were no pictures. Give me my money or I'll file a chargeback" has a better chance of making it up the chain and changing policy. A chargeback on its own could mean any number of things and it's easier for management to write it off a "just fraud" or similar. If you just want to screw the company but potentially not encourage them to change = Immediate chargeback If you want to try and change the company's policies = Support + Chargeback if not fixed I'm not making a judgement call either way, I think both are acceptable in this scenario. I'm just pointing out that if change is your real desire, the support route has better odds.
- calc_exe 4mo agoGotcha, I may have made some assumptions on how the process works. From the handful of chargeback stories I've heard from merchants, the credit card company passed along the cardholder's reasoning to the merchant when issuing the chargeback. So the merchant was able to figure out why the customer was unhappy. But that's anecdotal, I don't actually know if that's standard.
- ur-whale 4mo ago> Want your images back? Sure... That'll be $5! That kind of long con is (and has always been) part of the basic business model of most of the "free" service providers on the internet. First one is free, played on a decade time scale, works fine in a world where capital is quasi-free. The hyperscalers play it a little more subtly, but the principle is the same.
- xp84 4mo agoI really doubt anyone's getting rich off this. Genuinely doubt it. How many people remember their photobucket accounts, let alone bother to hunt them down, let alone want to bother getting a credit card out and remembering to cancel (or more hilariously, who's gonna pay $60 a year to keep that sub). I think whoever is running that site is probably barely breaking even at best, considering that they have to keep paying the S3 bill to store literally every image uploaded to PB ever.
- ur-whale 4mo agoI'd ask a different question: how many people on HN have hit their free quota limit in e.g. Google Photos and are now forking off 5 bucks a month because that's the easy way out ?
- xp84 4mo agoraises hand although it's for a family member. But that's a very different product. I was only saying I don't think the PB thing is getting anyone rich, rather it's probably bringing in just enough profit to keep whoever owns it from shutting it down and deleting the (S3) "bucket." As such, it's arguably a nice favor done to the few people who uploaded stuff to this site and are ever coming back for it. The alternative is for the stuff to have been long since deleted.
- jmathai 4mo agoGiven this is a largely technical crowd, I feel it my duty to share just how good (and free/open) Immich is. If you’re like me and don’t want to be an “admin for life” then it’s still for you. What has worked for me for over a decade is to keep the source of my photos in a boring old folder (backed up to my synology and Dropbox). And then layer photo viewing and sharing apps on top. The day I’m sick of Immich and there’s a better alternative, I switch. I’ve written about how it works as I’ve gone along. Recommend reading and putting your own twist on it. https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-photo-management-system-immich-edition/ https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-pho... https://medium.com/vantage/understanding-my-need-for-an-automated-photo-workflow-a2ff95b46f8f#.dmwyjlc57 https://medium.com/vantage/understanding-my-need-for-an-auto...
- lutr 4mo ago100%!! In fact I'm also using Immich and it's amazing! It's as good as the Google Photos app, but you own your data and can more cheaply upgrade your storage, if needed. On that old Photobucket account I was hoping to find screenshots I made as a kid. Didn't store actual photos there, thankfully.
- garaetjjte 4mo agoCan Immich on Android automatically upload taken photos like Google Photos?
- jpk2f2 4mo agoYes, it work well. It works less well on ios, some pain points due to how Apple handles background apps.
- allarm 4mo agoIt works okayish on ios. Could be better, but it works. Sometimes I just have to open the app on my iphone to start the sync process, but most of the times it just works. Anyway, i'm so glad i migrated, should have done it earlier.
- 4mo ago
- Liftyee 4mo agoRegardless of whether this is legal or not, I think this move is subjectively scummy. I know that profit maximisation means going against common ideas of what is "a nice thing to do", but there's a line that's been crossed here between "the business has to support itself" and "trying to exploit and milk our customers". Honestly, if storage costs were an issue, I would have preferred they delete it with notification than sell hope at a ransom. Wonder if there any startups that have grown without resorting to these low blow tactics - just the idealised free market of "we provide such a good service that you're willing to pay us our fair price".
- swiftcoder 4mo ago> I would have preferred they delete it The fact that they did delete it, and then tried to sell access to bupkis, is just the icing on the scummy corporate cake, eh?
- echoangle 4mo agoFrom the story I was assuming that OP maybe had multiple accounts he forgot about or that he actually uploaded the images without logging in, and that’s why there were no images to be restored. If the images actually were on the account and they deleted them, it would be crazy.
- lutr 4mo agoYes, that's exactly it! I must have had multiple accounts. I don't think they deleted any of my images.
- swiftcoder 4mo ago[dead]
- dspillett 4mo ago> I think this move is subjectively scummy I'd argue that it is objectively scummy.
- mihaaly 4mo agoJust like with almost everything Photobucket was sold or raised money from investors throughout the years repeatedly. That money they want back! From somewhere, any way, pimping the EBITDA and ARR numbers to the expected one for the 5-7 years resale cycle or such. ARR needs subscription, and if you have user lock in - well, otherwise you wouldn't buy some trivial service like this wouldn't you? You counted on the lock-in, that is central to you 'business model', or more like exploitation - then try cash it. Now! You can alienate people down the line? Let that be the problem of the next owner of the product, you will cash out soon anyway. And next PE look at the price/ARR ratio mostly, anyway, it will be a fine add-on to some other PE target at least, if the ARR ratio is fine. PE is shitting where it eats.... and others eat too ... ruining it for everyone. Don't care. Why don't they buy oil or beef farms or whatever, why they need to ruin the internet too?
- poody 4mo agoOh man.. you made my day.. I especially loved the tiki spongebob memes.. I still have Jacques Cousteau's voice going thru my head "One Hour Later"......
- mbo 4mo agoWhy are we complaining about this as a corporate greed thing? (I do agree that it's bad that there were no images preserved and that component of the post is justifiable) Obviously Photobucket completely failed to properly monetize, and was sold to Fox and then offloaded to some no-name startup called Ontela (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photobucket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photobucket). The service could have been shutdown completely and the harddrives fed into the shredder. Instead some former PE vulture did the math and figured out that preservation might make some money. You _can_ access old Photobucket images (when it works) that would otherwise get a median of 0 hits a month, while the rest of the internet succumbs to linkrot. Seems like a win-win for everyone involved.
- collinmanderson 4mo agohttps://xkcd.com/1150/ https://xkcd.com/1150/
- lutr 4mo agoLife really is a series of xkcds, it turns out!
- inigyou 4mo agoBack in the 2000s there was an implicit social contract that websites would treat your uploaded data with respect. You weren't putting your stuff in Chad's garage, you were putting it in a professional seeming storage business that just happened to be free because none of us really understood how to monetize the net.
- dghlsakjg 4mo agoZuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks 2004 is when that was typed. I'm not sure that that social contract ever existed. We just didn't understand how "free" services worked.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- mytailorisrich 4mo ago"As I was writing and reliving this beautiful experience, I noticed a little footnote on the payments page It's not a footnote or smallprint, it's written prominently right above the button so people are well aware of it...
- itsthecourier 4mo agostoring data over years takes money, so charging for it I can understand but charging and knowing you don't have any data for this user is a big NO NO
- lutr 4mo agoAgreed! I'd (sadly) pay more than $5 to recover some childhood memories that some services have deleted instead. Not $5/mo, though (I hate that part too).
- ibejoeb 4mo agoWow. Lede well buried. I thought I got the story, but after a while I started scanning over all the edge and missed that actual story. I really though we were complaining about spending $5 to retrieve data that had been stored for years at no cost. Pretty seedy move. That, and what appears to be the dark pattern of prompting for payment first, then ultimately allowing export after refusal.
- luisf_mc 4mo ago[flagged]
- ComputerGuru 4mo agoShout out to Flickr! No matter how many gigabytes you had uploaded, you can still access them. You just can’t upload more without a Flickr Pro plan.
- jmcphers 4mo agoIs this still true? I am a Flickr Pro user and the few times I've let my subscription lapse, I recall that I could only see my most recent 200 uploaded photos until I paid up again. They didn't delete them, for sure! But they were inaccessible.
- xp84 4mo ago...or $11 for a month, and you can cancel it? Where do people think the money comes from to store gigs and gigs of photos literally forever?
- Groxx 4mo agoKeep in mind that this is a brand which has offered 1TB free in the past. They kinda only have themselves to blame for any minimum-price assumptions.
- xp84 4mo agoI suppose, but that "brand" was owned by many different people, and the current one has very little to do with whatever people did in the past. At a certain point, one should at minimum back up all one's stuff when ownership changes, just in case the ZIRP economics don't exist to float those AWS bills anymore.
- Groxx 4mo agoTotally agreed on multiple owners... but that kind of brand-memory is literally what you're paying for when you buy a company and keep the name. Every buyer decided to keep the name.
- 4mo ago
- tobadzistsini 4mo agoAttachments are suffering, as the saying goes. Presuming the author used Photobucket in the early aughts and 26-ish years later he's curious about any photos?
- lutr 4mo agoThat's exactly it! And the saying fits so well here, in the literal sense too!
- herf 4mo agoThis is gross, it could be a onetime fee. It's hard to remember with all the ownership changes, but the Photobucket era was really a different time, of "it's your data, you're in charge, and we give you maximal control of it" - people would upload there to post elsewhere, and I recall they ran ads to monetize. But this era had the ethic that uploading was expensive, and you'd maybe want to do it once and have control of your stuff after that. Now we have photo hosting services that barely work on the web (iCloud), or work only within a walled garden (Instagram), and I do miss the "it's your stuff, we're just a website" kind of attitude from the mid-2000s.
- wang_li 4mo agoI, too, miss the time when I was a kid and people would give me free cookies. Now as an adult I have to buy my own cookies.
- herf 4mo agoYes, I think part of it was the "dark fiber" at the time, made bandwidth relatively cheap. But most personal photos don't use that much bandwidth - being able to use them anywhere online (which iCloud and Instagram don't allow) was a big idea. We went from "my content hosted in the cloud" to "Instagram's content" in a lot of ways. That is only partly a pricing issue.
- xp84 4mo agoI think the main thing here is merely that it's costly to keep a massive archive (of mostly garbage[1]) online and available on a long timescale. Not just the S3 bill (which I wouldn't underestimate the cost of, for a site that let just anyone upload basically infinite amounts for a decade), but the cost of having engineers maintain and monitor the site forever, either with revenue having dried up a decade ago, or, also having a staff of people to operate the whole business. You're remembering that if you uploaded something to some free site in 2001, it was still there in 2004. That was because the same people and companies were still around 3 years later, it wasn't because they cared more about you than 2026 startups do. Sure, 2004 Photobucket may have cared more about us than 2026 Meta does -- but I doubt 2001 AOL or AT&T cared about us more. [1] I only mean most of the content uploaded to Photobucket 2 decades ago is completely useless and abandoned with no one ever coming back to look for it. Memes or screenshots posted to forums that themselves have been offline for a decade. And just content that people don't remember even creating.
- _fat_santa 4mo agoThat's just fucking greedy. I've been working on a SaaS and it's honestly hard sometimes to not stoop to those greedy levels because the money is really there. Our policy is a subscription grants you write access to your account, but read access will always be there even after you subscription expires. We are still working on policies around long term data retention though.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- bluedino 4mo agoI have a legacy email account with a "used to be popular" ISP It's free, I've been using it for ~25 years, you know the drill. However, I lost access to it when I bought a new phone, and everything didn't transfer over. I couldn't reset the password without buying the 'premium' service, it was only $10 or $15, I was able to cancel after (so I wasn't re-charged next year or month).
- esafak 4mo agoNot to excuse their behavior, but Photobucket is dead. They are trying to wring the last drops of money out of it. You should not use dead commercial products.
- xp84 4mo agoMaybe I'm some kind of capitalist pig, because I can't find much to be mad about here. To summarize: 1. Customer took the initiative to check out a long-dormant free photo hosting account 2. Found that it required payment with a message implying strongly that the count of photos in the account was >0 3. Customer didn't like the idea of a subscription of any kind, but eventually figured out that you can just download your crap and cancel 4. Customer found that the account was apparently unused and empty 5. Customer cared a lot about his $5 but apparently only after 2 days had past since this incident Of all this, only #2 is annoying -- it would be best if they didn't use the call-to-action implying you have photos on the account when the count of photos is zero. I can see though how that wasn't built -- the question asked in a meeting about this upsell feature would have been, 'who are all these people who have Photobucket accounts with zero photos, who come back after a decade to log back into them?' Most sites from the 2005 or 1999 eras of VC money funded "Free" services simply shut down and deleted everything, many without much warning. For the 99% of people who are logging into an old photobucket account in 2026, sure, nobody needs to actually start a recurring subscription, but if you expect that they should store your stuff for 20 years and should never ask for a cent is the same attitude I had as a teen Napster user. Clearly the amount of value the customer is getting is "greater than zero" so about $0.25 a year for long-term archiving of photos is just fine.
- chabes 4mo ago> 4. Customer found that the account was apparently unused and empty Empty does not equate to unused. This was their old account that they definitely used.
- xp84 4mo agoHe said in the article that he guessed maybe he used a different account. This is a lot more believable (esp since he said it) than a conspiracy that PB deleted all photos and built this whole system just to steal $5 a pop -- especially considering how few people must be trying to get back into their 2-decade-old PB accounts in 2026. Hardly seems worth the effort for a scam.
- 4mo ago
- 827a 4mo agoI don't necessarily mean this to be dismissive, but it'll come off like that and it is what it is: Don't go through life getting this mad at something so inconsequential (five dollars). The typical response is "its the principal", but they're not beholden to your principals, and getting worked up because someone else compromised your principals is not healthy. Its just other people doing things. Neither money nor principals will save you from the downstream effects this attitude will have on your body and soul.
- Henchman21 4mo ago[flagged]
- 827a 4mo agoMaturity is recognizing that ninety-eight times out of a hundred, there actually is nothing you can do, because nothing you do will change it. Getting angry means you're letting these people you dislike into your head, controlling your thoughts; why would you be proud of that? In the remaining two times out of a hundred, regulating your emotions by providing them the feedback in a calm, direct manner is as effective as doing so in the manner this blog post took; sometimes it is even more effective, because people generally do not engage with others who they perceive to be acting without reason. You'll discover this path on your own, and make mistakes along the way, as anyone has. The thing you need to hear right now is: Your comment had exactly zero impact on me. It is like you never even posted it.
- Henchman21 4mo ago[flagged]
- signatoremo 4mo ago> Keep your shitty opinion to yourself. Look in the mirror and do the same
- tuesdaynight 4mo ago
- realityfactchex 4mo agoWhat's the best alternative? Flickr? I don't want to self-host my photos, too much management. I don't want to use Apple or Google or MS Clouds for various reasons. I do want to support a pure-play, independent-ish, profitable, consumer friendly platform. To upload hires shots and have them easy to tag/share/access among those to whom they may be of interest. I expect to pay, but not through the nose. Reliability matters. I would want the company to be around in 20 years and still reasonably priced/useful. Suggestions?
- doublepg23 4mo ago> I don't want to self-host my photos, too much management. I dunno https://immich.app https://immich.app is pretty painless IME.
- fg137 4mo agoYou still need a host that provides a large storage and monthly bandwidth, which is becoming expensive. It doesn't take care of backups either.
- lutr 4mo agoI self-host Immich on a personal home server. I do pay for backups, though. For 65GB of images (not a lot) I pay ~$1/mo to Backblaze. The backed-up data is 30% bigger in size right now (= 82GB), as it's incremental.
- fg137 4mo agoWhich means it's not "painless". The immich part may be, but compared to automatically synchronizing to iCloud or Google Photos, the experience is significantly worse for an average user.
- Ender-events 4mo agoPerhaps try https://ente.com/ https://ente.com/, as they offer a paid plan.
- econ 4mo agoHow would they respond to a GDPR request?
- codazoda 4mo agoAt least you were able to restore them. 25 years ago I was using the service and went a while without logging in. They deleted some of my favorite photos. They were photos I had taken with a cheap $20 digital camera (pushing it to it's limits). I hadn't backed my photo's up anywhere else so they were just lost. Edit: I see now that there were actually no photos to restore. A second question I wondered is if I could get at those long lost photos (I'm sure they were physically deleted back in the day).
- lutr 4mo agoThis is 100% true. I also lost all my old Yahoo accounts because I didn't log into them for >1 year. Same for a lot of videos I made on a nice little site called GoAnimate. So keeping data is better than removing it! Even charging a fee feels fair-ish. But forcing me to sign up for a subscription on an account I don't actually even have any data? Weeeelll, this doesn't feel so nice :)
- netsharc 4mo agoI use a Yahoo address for "throwaway" stuff like online shops. They had a catastrophe and lost some people's mail. I never got such an email, but one time I looked, and it lost all of my emails before 2000. Yeah I'm that old, when Yahoo launched an email service in 1996, I thought, "An @yahoo.com address?! That's so cool! I have to get one!". In theory a copy of the emails are on a harddisk, but its control board melted, and when I got the same model disk (to transplant its control board onto the disk with data), I couldn't find the original disk...
- tedggh 4mo agoThis seems besides unethical also illegal. Never assume companies have good legal counsel, particularly in the LLMs era. There are consumer protection laws and in the US they are by state. Sometimes all it takes is completing a 5 min form in the state AG’s website. Sure, $5 is not a lot of money, but screw them.
- atoav 4mo ago[flagged]
- geor9e 4mo agoIf Google Photos gave me my photos in one go, exactly as they are in the app, I'd gladly pay $5. As it stands, they offer "Takeout" for free. This process gives you hundreds of zip files with the photos distributed into deep subfolders by date. That would be forgivable if it weren't for the fact that they revert all their processing and deduping, leaving you with 20 copies of the same file scattered in random places. To make matters worse, if you try to download more than two zips at a time, it throws an error and forces you to start a new Takeout request. You then have to wait 24 hours for an email telling you that you can try downloading the zips all over again. I just assume the project manager responsible is a Dark Triad personality whose sole goal in life is preventing people from ever leaving Google Photos. My current strategy is to chisel it down by using the Google Photos search function to show 100 files as a time, which I download as a zip, then delete those 100 while they're still selected. That way they are somewhat organized and still deduped, unlike the mess that Takeout gives me.
- netsharc 4mo agoHuh, that reminds me of trying to download photos shared by other people after a group trip. Select all, download, GPhotos claims to have zipped all of it, but nope, the zip was missing a lottt of files...
- physicles 4mo agoHave you tried https://github.com/simulot/immich-go https://github.com/simulot/immich-go for dealing with the some of the complexity of google takeout? Not sure how much it actually handles, and whether it can be used easily if you're not migrating to immich, but it's what came to mind here. (I'm a new user of immich but never used google photos)
- cedel2k1 4mo ago"You want fries with thaat?"
- Smalltalker-80 4mo agoI think the lesson here is that you should always save (backup) your data on storage (services) and never on functional services. And this certainly includes Google, Apple and Microsoft Photos.
- kazinator 4mo agoWhat's next, paying to retrieve your car out of a parkade? Your car! That you can't even have a copy of!
- gblargg 4mo agoI don't have a problem with that. I wouldn't upload anything to these I didn't keep a local copy of. Monetarily it makes sense: they have to recover the cost of storing these images. By charging to recover every old image, they can cover the costs of holding on to these for people. The fallacy is that there's a third option between paid recovery and not storing them indefinitely: doing it for free.
- pinstripes 4mo agoW business move
- janalsncm 4mo ago> Apparently using Vercel to host a personal blog might not be the best idea. I'm nearly reaching the limit of Edge Requests in just 2 hours after the post. I had always thought that fixing outages was one of the least appealing parts of software engineering, but so many SWE blogs seem to have built blogs in ways where downtime is inevitable. Unless there is an extremely good reason not to use one, a static site generator works perfectly well. Next, there are many 3p services which will display that site for free. GitHub pages, AWS free tier, I’m sure there are plenty of other ones. Importantly, and relevant to this article, the files live on your computer. You can mirror them in any number of repos if you want, but it is not possible for any 3p service to hold them hostage. I am thoroughly convinced that this is the right way that I’d even go so far as to say it is a best practice for roll-your-own blogs, and any sort of issue like the article describes is a direct result of not following that best practice.
- oe 4mo agoPhotobucket has sent me the “do you want to keep your old photos?” email every three days or so, from 8/2023 onwards. Some of the emails specifically mention that there’s 35 photos, so at least mine’s not empty. I’d assume that at some point the emails must cost more than $5?
- PurelyApplied 4mo agoOh hey, Photobucket! I wonder what I stashed in there... Look through old email to figure out what email address they had. Attempt to log in, no memory of password. Get reset link sent to my ancient Hotmail. Hotmail doesn't recognize this device because I haven't logged in in a decade. Send an email to my hotmailspam@my-domain.com that I apparently set up at some point to confirm my identity. Have to enter multiple confirmation codes. Log into Hotmail, click link to reset Photobucket password. Create a new password, put it on my vault. "Failed to reset password Firebase: Error (auth/the-service-is-currently-unavailable.)." Perfect. No notes.
- rkagerer 4mo agoThere is a word for this, it's called Racketeering.
- LocalH 4mo agoThe so-called "legitimization" of predatory dark patterns is something that we collectively should never have allowed to happen, and which we should be demanding be changed. But as seen by the recent rejection of Stop Killing Games by the EU Commission, society has apparently decided that more money means you should have more say. So the corporations (who would absolutely go to the extremes in terms of ensuring that they don't plateau and instead make more money than last quarter) become the defacto government. Corporations are not people in and of themselves. They are groups of people at best (and with the way generative AI is going, that's not even guaranteed long-term). There are certain benefits to counting corporations as people for certain parts of contract law, but there is zero benefit to conferring free speech rights on the actual corporations themselves. Meanwhile, the current US administration is all about finding whatever grift they can attach to and enrich themselves at the cost of founding values. The biggest thing that pushes me towards idealistic communism is the actions taken by Western society. Maybe that's where we need to use the blockchain and related technologies, to enact the principles of communism without having the state be a proxy for the people. A documented, nearly unfalsifiable share of the means of production means that they'd have to resort to the $5 wrench to be evil in that context, instead of the massive corruption that historic implementations of communism have suffered while the frogs slowly boil. At least it might be a start, I don't know. I just know I see the path the world is taking, and right now the entire Western world is devolving into a weird techno-fascism that locks out any free thought
- TrackerFF 4mo agoThe thing that really sucks about Photobucket is that back in the mid 00s they were the king of free image hosting, and thus everyone used it. Now all the forum posts from back then are a graveyard of "This image is not currently unavailable" photos. Around 2017 they started charging, and I honestly hadn't used it in almost 10 years. But I managed to download all my photos - I can't remember what the trick was, but it was ridiculously easy to get around their racketeering nonsense back then. Then they incessantly started mailing about photos being deleted. It is a textbook example of scumbag behavior. Wouldn't surprise me if they wholesale sold photos to AI companies, while making the same photos unavailable even to paying customers.
- thelonelyborg 4mo agowhat if we say please?
- kgwxd 4mo ago> You shared them. Not "You transfer all copies to us, and erase your backups". The "protection" part is making sure the whole world doesn't see the copies you gave them. This "problem" is so old, it should be taught in pre-k by now. Sharing != backup. Friendly reminder to backup your decades old Gmail account before something like this happens too.
- ggm 4mo agoIf you want the older version, do "I have this <dead tape media> copy of my email from 1984, how can I recover it" and walk into "for an unlimited upside cost and $500 non returnable we will assess if your media is even readable" What value you put on memories is a good question. (The companies exist to help corporations recover million dollar risks and price their time and equipment to match that market, not boomer memory lane)
- jojomodding 4mo agoIn times like this, I am happy I live in the EU where I can request a company send me a copy of all data they have stored about me. That includes all pictures I ever send to them, or at least a low-resolution preview sufficient for me to realize which picture it is, or at the very least a file listing. Ah yes and they must do so without charging me anything.
- Vaslo 4mo agoIt’s a low ethic move to be clear but weren’t they paying to have servers to store your data all those years? Selfhost with Unraid and Immich.
- jms703 4mo agoNothing is free.
- onel 4mo agoThis is the kind of story that's push people towards self-hosting. I don't even have an account with photobucket but I fully feel the pain of this user and I got outraged just by reading this. I think this kind of SaaS business is going to go the way of the Dodo very soon.
- account42 4mo agoHow about taking some responsibility for not archiving your "childhood memories" yourself? IMO the main damaged party here is everyone who comes to old forum threads and finds lots of inaccessible images (or images watermarked to the point of being unusable). But then again it was never reasonable to expect image hosts to provide a free service forever.