
Photobucket limits displaying of images on external sites to $40/month plan - Doctor_Fegg
http://blog.norphil.co.uk/2017/06/photobucket-alert-new-sort-of-ransom.html
======
gizmo
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.

~~~
tedmiston
I think the ransom is that people have been using Photobucket to host images
posted on forums for 10+ years, often hotlinked. Suddenly all of those
historical hotlinks are going to break unless each user pays $400/year.

Changing the terms is one thing, but I think OP is upset that old images
aren't grandfathered.

Also, I know one obvious solution is to just move all of one's images to a new
host and edit the posts, but not all forums allow editing very old posts, some
threads will be locked, etc.

~~~
pc86
If the issue is that the traffic costs money, grandfathering old images
doesn't solve the root problem.

~~~
tedmiston
You're right, it doesn't, and the bandwidth of image hosting at that scale
clearly costs _someone_ real dollars. It's hard to imagine a good solution to
the hotlinked historical images problem.

Maybe a futureproof one is to maintain one's one domain with image urls that
redirect to the user's current host. I think this is the best approach for
book publishers. It's always frustrating to read references to blog posts etc
from a book more than a few years old and then find the links are broken from
a third party not maintaining the domain or changing it. Link rot is a real
problem we don't talk about much.

------
AndrewStephens
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
e) you have to self-police against CP and terrorist groups using your servers
to host their illegal content.

~~~
kevindqc
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?

------
CorpOverreach
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.

~~~
vbezhenar
Forum should download and host linked images. External links are not reliable
and it's not the first incident.

~~~
tyingq
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
You are exposed to the DMCA whether you host the images yourself of not.

------
userbinator
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
Can't you just put the image in an <iframe> with <meta name="referrer"
content="no-referrer" /> on?

~~~
IshKebab
No. Think about where photobucket is used.

~~~
userbinator
Also, just turning off the referer doesn't work for Photobucket --- you need
to send it the right one.

------
ComputerGuru
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-...](https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/what-happens-when-imgur-goes-out-of-
business/)

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.

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

~~~
schitzapplebits
What about imgur?

~~~
boyce
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

~~~
DavidBuchanan
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)

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

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ransom1538
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
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.

------
throwaway2016a
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.

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

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jk563
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
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

------
tedmiston
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?

~~~
chippy
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).

------
westcoastflea1
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

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ckastner
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
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.

------
spurlock
In the meantime, just use bukk.it for memes:

[https://bukk.it](https://bukk.it)

------
briandear
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.

