Photo-suck-it
Jul. 7th, 2017 10:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spiderbraidsA few months after LiveJournal's TOS change sent many long-time users, like myself, scurrying to alternatives such as Dreamwidth, another decade-old web institution with a Web 1.0 heritage has alienated its userbase with an unpopular change to their TOS: Photobucket :\
By now, you've probably already heard of the horror stories about pictures being broken across all sorts of forums and blogs because PB is now suddenly demanding $400/yr for the privilege of hotlinking photos, when hotlinking photos was what PB was all about when most of its users (like myself) signed up for free accounts something like a decade ago. Back then, free webhosting services like Geocities and Tripod were all the rage, but not only did these accounts come with meager storage (esp. by today's standards), they also came with the condition that hotlinking photos to those hosts from elsewhere was not allowed. That's where Photobucket came in, allowing users to upload their pictures to their accounts, and directly share a link to their pictures in other places, and even inline the pictures on their pages/forum posts/what have you. And of course the "free" aspect to the service came with an added built-in appeal: It meant that even people without credit cards (like you know, teenagers and college students ;-)) could sign up with no problem :-)
Of course, as Peter "Platypus Comix" Paltridge once wrote in one of his comics, "Nothing in life is ever truly free"*, and just like with most other free services, PB was (and still is) supported by advertising and premium paid services... the former of which can be a bit of a problem where directly-hotlinked pictures are concerned, since the only time the ads would ever be seen is when a user is uploading pictures, or those rare occasions that the pictures are being viewed in their "natural habitat" on PB. So it shouldn't be surprising that more recently, PB has tried to monetize their services by offering canvas prints and whatnot from photos uploaded to the site, and it's become more of a service aimed specifically at people who upload camera photos rather than, say, fanart or icons (esp. with the pricing plans being offered with the new TOS change). Linking to pictures on PB (as opposed to direct inlining) has automatically redirected to the page they're on for some time now (at least for typical free accounts like myself)... And that's not to mention how much advertising one gets on a typical Photobucket page these days :/
Still, one can't help but think that PB suddenly springing their new policy on everyone without notice was about the least classy way PB could have gone about trying to further monetize its popularity... I myself first noticed the issue when a forum I went to had one of those P500 images where its logo had normally been. At first I was bemused that they'd used PB to host the logo and thought it had exceeded its bandwidth allocation for the month (even in the good old days, PB gave free accounts a limited hotlinking bandwidth on a monthly basis), but a little digging around revealed the truth, and sure enough... lots of people were complaining (with plenty of comparison to the recent ransomware attacks) Sure, there were those advocating that PB needed to make money, but even those people probably found the demand to sign up with the highest tier of paid service just to get hotlinking a bit excessive... The new policy also explicitly mentions that direct linking to PB photos will no longer be allowed for free accounts under the new TOS, and it isn't clear if they'll just redirect to the "natural habitat" like before, or raise a stink about external links, a la Geocities and Tripod of old :/
This isn't even the first time a well-known free image hosting service decided to go pay-only: ImageShack appears to have handled the transition much better, in that there actually was a transition, giving their free users a grace period to either get pictures off their account or start paying for the service before a given date. Granted, unlike with PB, pictures were outright removed from the service, and people did complain about losing their images, but at least those people got some sort of warning, instead of finding out after they got cut off...
Anyways, this past week, while pondering what service(s) to use next, I've been busy getting the pics out of my bucket, and PB hasn't made it easy. In contrast to the other horror stories I've heard, I've been relatively lucky that I've been able to access my bucket properly, and the "Download album" button has mostly worked okay for me (I'm guessing that the Captcha services are getting plenty of useful data between everyone trying to get their albums), but even then, videos and animated GIFs aren't included as part of the ZIP and have to be downloaded manually... which means having to deal with a bucketload (pun slightly intended) of ads and rather slow response time for each single GIF I've had to download manually (never did videos), and if you've got subfolders, you'll have to download each subfolder separately. All the better for PB to show more adverts while each download request is processing :/
(I tried using pb_scraper and the like to automatically download my bucket, but all I ever got was that crummy P500 placeholder picture. At least pb_scraper allows the links of the files to be listed out in detail, so I can go directly to the GIFs' pages and manually download them... Also helps that AFAIK, I don't have many extra large pictures that would have been resized for the "natural habitat")
I leave you with two tweets comparing the two controversial TOS changes of 2017 to the same (ancient-)historical event...
* Peter once wrote a comic in which a pitchman uses this observation in a shamelessly blatant attempt to get readers to donate to the site. Sounds benign enough, but I'll let you discover for yourself how it ends up looking less like Patreon (which Peter now uses for real) and more like, well, Photobucket a la 2017 :-)
By now, you've probably already heard of the horror stories about pictures being broken across all sorts of forums and blogs because PB is now suddenly demanding $400/yr for the privilege of hotlinking photos, when hotlinking photos was what PB was all about when most of its users (like myself) signed up for free accounts something like a decade ago. Back then, free webhosting services like Geocities and Tripod were all the rage, but not only did these accounts come with meager storage (esp. by today's standards), they also came with the condition that hotlinking photos to those hosts from elsewhere was not allowed. That's where Photobucket came in, allowing users to upload their pictures to their accounts, and directly share a link to their pictures in other places, and even inline the pictures on their pages/forum posts/what have you. And of course the "free" aspect to the service came with an added built-in appeal: It meant that even people without credit cards (like you know, teenagers and college students ;-)) could sign up with no problem :-)
Of course, as Peter "Platypus Comix" Paltridge once wrote in one of his comics, "Nothing in life is ever truly free"*, and just like with most other free services, PB was (and still is) supported by advertising and premium paid services... the former of which can be a bit of a problem where directly-hotlinked pictures are concerned, since the only time the ads would ever be seen is when a user is uploading pictures, or those rare occasions that the pictures are being viewed in their "natural habitat" on PB. So it shouldn't be surprising that more recently, PB has tried to monetize their services by offering canvas prints and whatnot from photos uploaded to the site, and it's become more of a service aimed specifically at people who upload camera photos rather than, say, fanart or icons (esp. with the pricing plans being offered with the new TOS change). Linking to pictures on PB (as opposed to direct inlining) has automatically redirected to the page they're on for some time now (at least for typical free accounts like myself)... And that's not to mention how much advertising one gets on a typical Photobucket page these days :/
Still, one can't help but think that PB suddenly springing their new policy on everyone without notice was about the least classy way PB could have gone about trying to further monetize its popularity... I myself first noticed the issue when a forum I went to had one of those P500 images where its logo had normally been. At first I was bemused that they'd used PB to host the logo and thought it had exceeded its bandwidth allocation for the month (even in the good old days, PB gave free accounts a limited hotlinking bandwidth on a monthly basis), but a little digging around revealed the truth, and sure enough... lots of people were complaining (with plenty of comparison to the recent ransomware attacks) Sure, there were those advocating that PB needed to make money, but even those people probably found the demand to sign up with the highest tier of paid service just to get hotlinking a bit excessive... The new policy also explicitly mentions that direct linking to PB photos will no longer be allowed for free accounts under the new TOS, and it isn't clear if they'll just redirect to the "natural habitat" like before, or raise a stink about external links, a la Geocities and Tripod of old :/
This isn't even the first time a well-known free image hosting service decided to go pay-only: ImageShack appears to have handled the transition much better, in that there actually was a transition, giving their free users a grace period to either get pictures off their account or start paying for the service before a given date. Granted, unlike with PB, pictures were outright removed from the service, and people did complain about losing their images, but at least those people got some sort of warning, instead of finding out after they got cut off...
Anyways, this past week, while pondering what service(s) to use next, I've been busy getting the pics out of my bucket, and PB hasn't made it easy. In contrast to the other horror stories I've heard, I've been relatively lucky that I've been able to access my bucket properly, and the "Download album" button has mostly worked okay for me (I'm guessing that the Captcha services are getting plenty of useful data between everyone trying to get their albums), but even then, videos and animated GIFs aren't included as part of the ZIP and have to be downloaded manually... which means having to deal with a bucketload (pun slightly intended) of ads and rather slow response time for each single GIF I've had to download manually (never did videos), and if you've got subfolders, you'll have to download each subfolder separately. All the better for PB to show more adverts while each download request is processing :/
(I tried using pb_scraper and the like to automatically download my bucket, but all I ever got was that crummy P500 placeholder picture. At least pb_scraper allows the links of the files to be listed out in detail, so I can go directly to the GIFs' pages and manually download them... Also helps that AFAIK, I don't have many extra large pictures that would have been resized for the "natural habitat")
I leave you with two tweets comparing the two controversial TOS changes of 2017 to the same (ancient-)historical event...
"Photobasketcase has just burnt down a digital library of Alexandria." #photobucket @photobucket #ransom #corporatesuicide
— Ian Billings (@Ian_norvic) July 5, 2017
feels like burning the Library of Alexandria
— 🌈pride is political (@whatkatie_did) April 6, 2017
* Peter once wrote a comic in which a pitchman uses this observation in a shamelessly blatant attempt to get readers to donate to the site. Sounds benign enough, but I'll let you discover for yourself how it ends up looking less like Patreon (which Peter now uses for real) and more like, well, Photobucket a la 2017 :-)
