Photobucket limits displaying of images on external sites to $40/month plan | Hacker News Reader

Photobucket limits displaying of images on external sites to $40/month plan

blog.norphil.co.uk

64 pointsDoctor_Fegg60 comments

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

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.

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.

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

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.

They probably consider it ransom because the terms were changed after the relationship was established.

Unlimited linking probably doesn't include embedding.

So, if they were on a lower end plan, something that used to be offered was taken away. After they invested time in uploading and embedding lots of images.

Terms are _always_ subject to change.

We're talking about 1 dollar per day for image hosting here. These panicky reactions seem totally overblown to me. I don't think this is really about the price as an absolute number. This is more of an emotional reaction about the price changing, which some people feel is fundamentally unfair.

$1/day is not an insignificant amount for a lot of people, especially around the world. Hell, paying anything can be a difficult proposition when you don't have a CC.

Also, that's just for one image hoster. If it catches on, a person who used a few over the years would have to pay thousands per year to avoid losing links.

But you're right that's not just about the money.

> $1/day is not an insignificant amount

Especially considering nearly everything has a monthly fee attached these days.

$3 here, $5 there, $9.99 over there. Of course businesses should be paid for the services they offer, but as a consumer those numbers add up quickly, and in that context a subscription in the $30/$40 range is non-trivial, even for someone with a first world salary.

I can't imagine they provide that level of value, but that's just my opinion.

There's also a note that getting your images out to move them to another provider is deliberately difficult.

In any case, how most photobucket users feel about it will ultimately matter more than what we outside observers think.

Terms are certainly subject to change, however users have a right to feel a bit abused given that this service effectively engaged in a bait and switch -- undercut competitors, get it heavily used and entrenched, apply or increase costs.

Ah, yes, the old ten year long-con bait and switch.

I enjoy the sarcasm, but it most certainly is. We see it constantly with services that have no revenue plan and heavily promote entrenchment -- the duration before they start turning the screws will vary in their runway, investors, and how long other ventures can keep it afloat, but it absolutely is a form of bait and switch, and it's endemic in the startup industry.

PG notoriously has stated a number of times that you don't need to even think about revenue, much less income -- just get users. You can do the switch later, whether it's blanketing with ads (see imgur), subscription plans, etc.

no not emotional it is financial i dont have another 40.00 a month to pay photobucket for its crappy service a site that is down at least 2 or 3 times a month or incredibly slow so that i literally cant work for that day making new listings not to mention all the broken links to in my listings i either HAVE TO PAY 400.00 a month instead of 2.99 or lose 3 years of work

Because they made their money and their fame by providing a way for users to embed photos in other sites for free in a very classic bait and switch (see: ImageShack in 2010 and Imgur in 2020 [0]).

[0]: https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/what-happens-when-imgur-goes-...

Bear in mind that this is not a fee for _forums_ to pay (where $400 a month for image embedding could be reasonable). This is a fee for the _users_ to pay, to be able to embed the images on their Photobucket accounts elsewhere on the web.

I doubt many users would be interested in paying $35 for the "linking" version (which is literally just links, not embedding), let alone the $400 version.

I'm not seeing a $35 linking version...it's $100/year. The "no links / no embedding" plan is $60/year, which is just hilarious for 50GB of mostly useless storage. http://photobucket.com/pricing

Ah, yeah even more so, I was just going on what the preceding comment said.

it is 400.00 a year for image linking. no linking or embedding with any less expensive plan

You could pay amazon $35 a month for 100GB storage and about 70m hits per month, or 27req/s sustained for your images...

At more usual numbers of a few million hits per month, cut that by 10x or so

And a 2nd hand 200GB hard drive from ebay costs 5 bucks. That's not comparable though, because Photobucket offers many image related services. Maybe forum operators aren't interested any of those services and they should be using a dumb storage provider instead.

It's not forum operators using Photobucket. It's the user of the forum.

I wasn't really trying to compare photobucket and s3 feature wise anyway, just highlighting that the price is completely out of proportion for the cost to host and distribute those images even with a cloud provider.

A lot of the use probably is not all that serious in volume and "locked" to hotlinking. Suddenly requiring quite a lot of money for hotlinking is quite a big change.

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.

Sorry for the late reply, but forums do allow you to upload your own images. Every modern script (both paid and free) has an attachment feature or a gallery add on you can use with it.

However, this isn't the best for the actual users, because:

1. Most forums disable hotlinking for obvious reasons. So if they upload an image to a forum, they'll then have to do the same thing for every other forum they post it on.

2. Forums often require users to register to see attachments, so the images are either invisible or reduced to tiny thumbnails for guests.

Stuff like Imgur and Photobucket got popular because people could post an image once and use the same URL lots of times knowing anyone could see it.

But yeah, forums do host images themselves and have for about a decade or so. Very few have problems with disc space, bandwidth or illegal content either, I know since I've run them for years without issue.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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

In addition to Photobucket, Dropbox disabled (after some advance warning) its former Public folder feature in March this year, which killed another big chunk of embedded images in old forum threads. That one can be worked around without paying anything by converting the old public folders to "shared" folders with the sharing permissions set public, and then going back and editing the old forum threads to point to the new image URLs, but as you can imagine a pretty small percentage of people are going to do that for old threads.

Not really a loss of history as much as broken links. The files still exist.

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/"

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

No. Think about where photobucket is used.

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

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-...

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.

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

What about imgur?

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

I wrote a simple extension to disable the new direct image link behaviour: https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/imgur-anti-anti-hotlink

The 'open in app' also helpfully floats over the image on mobile with a nice narrow area to close the floating popup, oh look the store has just opened for me to download the imgur app again, if only they under stood by clicking X I'm never going to want your app.

I consider imgur a poor choice because it doesn't work with JavaScript disabled (dunno how Drive, Dropbox or Photobucket do, just that imgur breaks). It's in the business of serving JPEGs and HTML containing <img> tags pointing to JPEGs; to break that HTML such that those JPEGs don't serve is failing to deliver on its core business.

Sure, use JavaScript to implement infinite scrolling or on-demand loading, but fall back to usable pure HTML.

I'm confused. Which part doesn't work without js, the hosting or uploading?

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

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 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).

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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).

There was a story[1] a few days ago about how imgur was becoming more annoying and obtrusive in the face of Reddit's new image hosting features. Ultimately, for image hosting (like everything else) there's no free lunch.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14595212

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

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.)

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.

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

https://bukk.it

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com