Photo-suck-it, part 3
Dec. 30th, 2020 10:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spiderbraidsOne last post before 2020 is out...
Part 1 | Part 2
Okay, so one would think that, given the events of 2017, the new Photobucket management would think twice about even threatening to break legacy uploaded images, but while I probably would have been content to just leave my account alone (and presumably many others), I recently got an email saying "Click Now Before You Lose All Your Images", telling me that "you must access your Photobucket account in the next 60 days to keep it in “active” status. If you take no action within this period, your account access may be restricted." So of course I logged in, which resulted in my account being migrated to the new look PB... The interface is slicker, but it's not exactly all roses, since (pursuant to the free plan) they hide all but the first 250 images behind a blur until I upgrade :-\ (Which makes my decision to back up my bucket back in '17 look all the smarter :-) Or in other words... at least this once, foresight was 2020 :-))
(And now you see why I wanted to get this one out before the end of the year ;-) Incidentally, the new look PB also means the end of a workaround to see the pictures in their natural habitat without blurring/watermarks [TBF, their current watermark is now more discrete than before, but I digress]: change the 'i' at the start of the URL to an 's', and tack on a '.html' at the end, but more on that a bit)
And that's just considering active accounts... Inactive accounts' buckets cannot be accessed at all; it just bounces back to the main page with a brief toast saying that the user is inactive. Thankfully, their images are still there (for now; they're ostensibly obliged to not delete them, but who knows how that plays for inactive accounts?) and can still be accessed without blurring/watermarks, simply by pasting the URL in the address bar, bringing up a page with the picture, presumably intended to be surrounded by ads based on the source-code (of course, it also works that way for active accounts :-)) This was how it used to work before 2017 (albeit with a redirect to the URL obtained from using the previous workaround), but after that, it just showed the picture with watermarking and blurring, so we can be thankful for that I suppose :-)
Nevertheless, I've been leaving my account alone since 2017 (my last photo was a picture of a "Moving" truck photoshopped to add "to Dreamwidth"), and (you can probably guess this if you've checked the URL for images in my post-2017 posts) I decided on PostImages, which seems to be essentially trying to be more like old-school Photobucket (albeit without the ability to make sub-albums), and so far I'm a happy camper (knock on wood :-))
Part 1 | Part 2
Okay, so one would think that, given the events of 2017, the new Photobucket management would think twice about even threatening to break legacy uploaded images, but while I probably would have been content to just leave my account alone (and presumably many others), I recently got an email saying "Click Now Before You Lose All Your Images", telling me that "you must access your Photobucket account in the next 60 days to keep it in “active” status. If you take no action within this period, your account access may be restricted." So of course I logged in, which resulted in my account being migrated to the new look PB... The interface is slicker, but it's not exactly all roses, since (pursuant to the free plan) they hide all but the first 250 images behind a blur until I upgrade :-\ (Which makes my decision to back up my bucket back in '17 look all the smarter :-) Or in other words... at least this once, foresight was 2020 :-))
(And now you see why I wanted to get this one out before the end of the year ;-) Incidentally, the new look PB also means the end of a workaround to see the pictures in their natural habitat without blurring/watermarks [TBF, their current watermark is now more discrete than before, but I digress]: change the 'i' at the start of the URL to an 's', and tack on a '.html' at the end, but more on that a bit)
And that's just considering active accounts... Inactive accounts' buckets cannot be accessed at all; it just bounces back to the main page with a brief toast saying that the user is inactive. Thankfully, their images are still there (for now; they're ostensibly obliged to not delete them, but who knows how that plays for inactive accounts?) and can still be accessed without blurring/watermarks, simply by pasting the URL in the address bar, bringing up a page with the picture, presumably intended to be surrounded by ads based on the source-code (of course, it also works that way for active accounts :-)) This was how it used to work before 2017 (albeit with a redirect to the URL obtained from using the previous workaround), but after that, it just showed the picture with watermarking and blurring, so we can be thankful for that I suppose :-)
Nevertheless, I've been leaving my account alone since 2017 (my last photo was a picture of a "Moving" truck photoshopped to add "to Dreamwidth"), and (you can probably guess this if you've checked the URL for images in my post-2017 posts) I decided on PostImages, which seems to be essentially trying to be more like old-school Photobucket (albeit without the ability to make sub-albums), and so far I'm a happy camper (knock on wood :-))
