Photo-suck-it, part 2
May. 31st, 2019 11:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spiderbraidsOkay, so... In light of another long-running free image hosting service, Flickr, changing its terms much to its free users' chagrin, let's take a look at stuff that's happened since my previous post on Photobucket: some good, some... well, not as heinous as completely disabling hotlinking, but still not so good...
First, about a week after the original post, some person came up with, and tweeted about, a service called "Save My Pictures Please" for downloading entire folders, so I decided to give it a try. Due to the sheer size of trying to downloading everything in one go, the site kept returning errors, so I settled for gradually saving my pictures one folder at a time, which it handled just fine... for about a week, if that, before the site "temporarily", then permanently, suspended services :-O About a week after that I found a PHP script offering essentially the same function without the online middleman, and since I had a Raspberry Pi microcomputer, I thought it was worth a try (wouldn't have wanted to install PHP and tie up the desktop for this), and after installing PHP and making a minor modification to make it resumable, I managed to get all my pix (no ransom pictures to be seen here this time!) and copied them to external HDD for safekeeping :-)
In December '17, I also found a Firefox plugin that bypassed the whole PB issue, and as far as I can tell, it worked by using the referrer trick to pretend that you're viewing the pictures on their "natural habitat" (just checked, it's no longer being offered, and has been disabled for those who did install it, which I suppose is understandable...)
Last April, PB sent a survey asking for opinions on improving their services. Of course, I made sure to explain nicely that the whole free storage space for hotlinking thing was an important feature, within reason of course :-) In May, it was announced that PB got itself new management, and rescinded its previous paid account requirements for hotlinking, even offering more reasonable plans than the original $399/year (!) Life was good for a while (well, for those who hadn't deleted their accounts in disgust yet...)
Now the not very good parts, and they only get worse and worse for those who'd rather stick to free:
PB announced in November that in order to "keep free... free" (their words), they've been watermarking pictures hotlinked from non-paying accounts (since October at least on some accounts, and of course paid accounts are watermark-free) Jury's still out on it... that said, they call the watermark subtle, I call it intrusive enough to wreak havoc with composition and text :-/ In any case, viewing at the "natural habitat" is watermark-free for the time being :-)
Next, a more important one... Looking at the plans page, they've been not only emphasizing the paid plans over free (relegating that to a quick mention on the plans page), but also emphasizing its use for camera photos (I know, it's right there in the name), by giving an approximate image count equivalent that equates to 10MB per photo. Pretty sure that most of us who signed up in the good old days probably never dreamed of even needing more than 2MB for a picture... Well, the equivalent image count used to be just a suggestion, but this April, they've decided to explicitly codify that "10MB=1 image" equivalence, by imposing additional image count limits, on top of their previous announcement that all free accounts get 2.5GB "regardless of prior storage limits" (which AFAIK would actually be an upgrade for me), meaning that free accounts get the minimum of 2.5GB or 250 images (to wit, a: I have over 18000 images, about 10k of which are tiny avatar icons, and b: even Flickr offers 1000 images for free), making sizing images for web presentation (with the bonus of saving bucket space) now more or less a waste of time :-\ (well, at least for those who are still actually uploading to their accounts)
And on top of that, just this month, I just got an email this month that starting in June, free users' bandwidth will be reduced to a grand total of 25 MB a month (!) before the pictures get blurred on top of watermarking (seriously!) thus presumably forcing "natural habitat" viewing (for the record, looking through my email archives, I had 25GB allowance in 2009, reduced to 10GB in 2014, so this represents a reduction by a factor of 400[!]) This tweet expresses my thoughts pretty well...
(BTW, Photobucket also still seems to be getting plenty of customer complaints about downtime and other functionality issues, based on what's being posted at their Facebook :-\ Make of that what you will)
First, about a week after the original post, some person came up with, and tweeted about, a service called "Save My Pictures Please" for downloading entire folders, so I decided to give it a try. Due to the sheer size of trying to downloading everything in one go, the site kept returning errors, so I settled for gradually saving my pictures one folder at a time, which it handled just fine... for about a week, if that, before the site "temporarily", then permanently, suspended services :-O About a week after that I found a PHP script offering essentially the same function without the online middleman, and since I had a Raspberry Pi microcomputer, I thought it was worth a try (wouldn't have wanted to install PHP and tie up the desktop for this), and after installing PHP and making a minor modification to make it resumable, I managed to get all my pix (no ransom pictures to be seen here this time!) and copied them to external HDD for safekeeping :-)
In December '17, I also found a Firefox plugin that bypassed the whole PB issue, and as far as I can tell, it worked by using the referrer trick to pretend that you're viewing the pictures on their "natural habitat" (just checked, it's no longer being offered, and has been disabled for those who did install it, which I suppose is understandable...)
Last April, PB sent a survey asking for opinions on improving their services. Of course, I made sure to explain nicely that the whole free storage space for hotlinking thing was an important feature, within reason of course :-) In May, it was announced that PB got itself new management, and rescinded its previous paid account requirements for hotlinking, even offering more reasonable plans than the original $399/year (!) Life was good for a while (well, for those who hadn't deleted their accounts in disgust yet...)
Now the not very good parts, and they only get worse and worse for those who'd rather stick to free:
PB announced in November that in order to "keep free... free" (their words), they've been watermarking pictures hotlinked from non-paying accounts (since October at least on some accounts, and of course paid accounts are watermark-free) Jury's still out on it... that said, they call the watermark subtle, I call it intrusive enough to wreak havoc with composition and text :-/ In any case, viewing at the "natural habitat" is watermark-free for the time being :-)
Next, a more important one... Looking at the plans page, they've been not only emphasizing the paid plans over free (relegating that to a quick mention on the plans page), but also emphasizing its use for camera photos (I know, it's right there in the name), by giving an approximate image count equivalent that equates to 10MB per photo. Pretty sure that most of us who signed up in the good old days probably never dreamed of even needing more than 2MB for a picture... Well, the equivalent image count used to be just a suggestion, but this April, they've decided to explicitly codify that "10MB=1 image" equivalence, by imposing additional image count limits, on top of their previous announcement that all free accounts get 2.5GB "regardless of prior storage limits" (which AFAIK would actually be an upgrade for me), meaning that free accounts get the minimum of 2.5GB or 250 images (to wit, a: I have over 18000 images, about 10k of which are tiny avatar icons, and b: even Flickr offers 1000 images for free), making sizing images for web presentation (with the bonus of saving bucket space) now more or less a waste of time :-\ (well, at least for those who are still actually uploading to their accounts)
And on top of that, just this month, I just got an email this month that starting in June, free users' bandwidth will be reduced to a grand total of 25 MB a month (!) before the pictures get blurred on top of watermarking (seriously!) thus presumably forcing "natural habitat" viewing (for the record, looking through my email archives, I had 25GB allowance in 2009, reduced to 10GB in 2014, so this represents a reduction by a factor of 400[!]) This tweet expresses my thoughts pretty well...
(BTW, Photobucket also still seems to be getting plenty of customer complaints about downtime and other functionality issues, based on what's being posted at their Facebook :-\ Make of that what you will)
