Photobucket (outrageous charges)....

[Watermann]

Photo hosting off site. OneDrive from MS is free and has 5 gigs of space on the free side. They generate embed code and can resize pics. I don't think MS is going to go belly up anytime soon like all these free pic hosting sites. I've tested it seeing as it's ad free, fast and from the biggest money maker in the world of computing I feel more safe about it than any other option so far. It's accessible on any machine you use and has apps for you phone too.

 

[bruceb58]

Edit: BTW, I'm not disagreeing with your broader point. Nothing worth anything is free. I just think that PB jumped the shark here.

I think you totally are missing what PB is doing and the $399 charge. They don't want to do 3rd party hosting anymore...at all. There is no profit in it for them. They put an outrageous price on it so that if anyone HAD to do it for some reason they could do it. I am sure they don't expect but a fraction of people to actually do it.

My opinion on PB is that they would go out of business if they didn't do this. They have probably been losing enough money they will eventually anyway. I would never post anything on a cloud site like PB that I didn't already have copies elsewhere anyway. Hearing that people are downloading pictures from PB so that they still have copies sounds like a bad plan in the first place.

 

[muskyfins]

We can second guess PB's finances and business strategy all we want, but unless they share actual information with us, it's all just speculation.

The carppy thing is how they went about it. This decision wasn't made in a matter of minutes. And even it was, how about a notice saying something like "On X date, our TOS will change to the follwing....."

And as far as money goes, my opinion FWIW, if they only have 1 million users and went with something like $3.99 per month, comes out to $4M per month. Buys a lot of storage and bandwidth.

 

[bruceb58]

We can second guess PB's finances and business strategy all we want, but unless they share actual information with us, it's all just speculation.

Image hosting sites like PB are doomed to failure. Imgur will be the next to go so don't jump on that sinking ship either. I use Dropbox for storing files including images that I post on forums and I never expect them to last forever either even though they will likely IPO this year. I have never liked PB and in the past have never encouraged people to use it when they ask how to put their photos on there.

 

[laurentide]

I think you totally are missing what PB is doing and the $399 charge. They don't want to do 3rd party hosting anymore...at all. There is no profit in it for them. They put an outrageous price on it so that if anyone HAD to do it for some reason they could do it. I am sure they don't expect but a fraction of people to actually do it.

Yeah, that makes sense. You're probably correct. Like the guy who tells his wife he'll sell his boat and puts it on CL for $100K, knowing that no one will buy it at that price.

Edit: and to your comment about imgur, yeah, they're already talking about changing their hosting structure. I expect the images in my build thread to vanish someday as well.

It's up to the forums now to provide real, practical image hosting solutions. What is here now is too obfuscated for many to deal with IMO. The forums can at least serve us ads (and force us to turn off ad-blockers) to recoup some of the DB costs.

 

[GA_Boater]

It isn't a bad plan to download pics from PB to your computer. Especially when the PB mobile app will upload pics to PB for easy sharing. Lose your phone, lose your pics except those on PB. Then what are you gonna do?

My PB pics are organized differently than the picture directories on my PC, so I downloaded to new directories matching my PB albums. That makes it easier for me if and when PB cuts me off at the knees.

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BTW - It's time to stop talking about why PB did this because none of us know and are only speculating. It's a done deal and unless they change, we're stuck with the results. Again we should be sharing how to workaround the problem. Griping and moaning doesn't solve a thing.

 

[jbcurt00]

......we should be sharing how to workaround the problem.....

Yep, I like WMs OneDrive by MS suggestion, primarily (again...) because I can access it anywhere from any device. Not as big a deal to me now, as I don't travel extensively like I did 4yrs ago, but I do travel, and access the forum from lots of different devices.

Watermann, does OneDrive use similar IMG codes to post pix? The other reason I favored PB is the IMG codes worked across all the forums I use. 1 place in particular (better since they upgraded the forum software) was a bear to upload multiple pix

I should have all the pix I uploaded to PB, somewhere, on a handful of pulled harddrives, so when I get time and access to a real computer instead of my cell, I'll download my pix

 

[bruceb58]

It isn't a bad plan to download pics from PB to your computer. Especially when the PB mobile app will upload pics to PB for easy sharing. Lose your phone, lose your pics except those on PB. Then what are you gonna do?.

Every single pic I take with my phone gets auto uploaded to google photos.

 

[Watermann]

On PB you can choose to download entire folders, they zip the folder automatically for you. I have all my pics stored locally but there are 100's of them that I didn't upload for the forum. It'll make it much easier having the same pics in the PB folders when the time comes for me to replace the pics in my threads. Date of post and date created for the pics will get me close.

Yeah John OD has an embed code it will generate for your pic and you can choose the size or resolution you want the pic to be.

 

[bruceb58]

On PB you can choose to download entire folders,

Too bad PB doesn't do what Dropbox, Amazon, Google and others do and just have everything you have up on the cloud look like a folder on your PC. Then you just drag and drop. Can't believe PB is stuck with a procedure that was used 10 years ago.

 

[laurentide]

Every single pic I take with my phone gets auto uploaded to google photos.

Google photos is an awesome web app. Anybody with a gmail account can use it and it automatically uploads all of your phone photos to a free 17GB account. Every photo I've taken for 10 years is stored in that account.

I guess google is smart enough to not allow embeddable URL's, so it's unfortunately not a solution here. But still a great service for you guys dealing with hard drives and such.

 

[Tnstratofam]

On PB you can choose to download entire folders, they zip the folder automatically for you.

^
This is what I did last night. I downloaded all my folders to my laptop. You have to download videos individually though. I'm going to play around with the folders this week to see how easy they are to organize, and how easy it is to move the pictures out of the zip files.

 

[GA_Boater]

^
This is what I did last night. I downloaded all my folders to my laptop. You have to download videos individually though. I'm going to play around with the folders this week to see how easy they are to organize, and how easy it is to move the pictures out of the zip files.

Windows - Just click the zip filename and Extract is an option that pops up. Click that and choose a destination folder. Set up your album folders before extracting so the destination folder is listed to choose.

For me I made a PB Download folder with a sub-folder names that matched the PB album names. That way the PB download folder sub-folders mirror what's stored on PB.

 

[Tnstratofam]

Thanks GA. That seems simple enough. As far as I can tell my pics are still up in all the threads I've posted in for now. I'm going to keep an eye on my Transom resto thread to watch for them to be taken down. I'll replace those pics with uploads when I have more time.

 

[bruceb58]

MTboatguy wife has a web hosting business. Bet he could comment on how a business like his wife's could do a 3rd party hosting program and how much something that would cost.

 

[StarTed]

What about us people that have decided to not become computer geniuses?

All my pictures are safe on my computer and backed up on my one drive.

The biggest problem for me is that my internet is slower than a snail in a race and the uploads to PB took forever.

I take higher resolution pictures for my purpose so re-saving them again at a lower resolution just adds complexity.

I strongly feel that iboats should have the photos on their own servers so this kind of thing won't happen in the future. These builds and photos are priceless. However, many of us don't spend our money on services so that could affect membership and viewers. Why can't iboats resize the photos as needed when receiving them from us?

Whatever iboats decides I hope we can recover most of the priceless photos.

 

[Rick Stephens]

Thanks GA. That seems simple enough. As far as I can tell my pics are still up in all the threads I've posted in for now. I'm going to keep an eye on my Transom resto thread to watch for them to be taken down. I'll replace those pics with uploads when I have more time.

Problem with that plan is you don't have access to edit your old posts. The forum rules will have to change before you can redo your photos.

 

[bruceb58]

I take higher resolution pictures for my purpose so re-saving them again at a lower resolution just adds complexity.

Put his on your PC. It's one right click. It's the same program that used to be available for MS for XP. It either makes a resized copy or changes the original...your choice.
http://www.bricelam.net/ImageResizer/

I strongly feel that iboats should have the photos on their own servers so this kind of thing won't happen in the future.

You already have that option. Click the camera button on the left side of where you write your post.

 

[Rick Stephens]

I strongly feel that iboats should have the photos on their own servers so this kind of thing won't happen in the future. These builds and photos are priceless. However, many of us don't spend our money on services so that could affect membership and viewers. Why can't iboats resize the photos as needed when receiving them from us?

Whatever iboats decides I hope we can recover most of the priceless photos.

The problem with asking forum rulers to set new policies, in this case take your big photos and make them all smaller, is you force all of everything to be "one size fits all".

As things are, if you want, you can upload some pretty big pictures. If those pictures are JPEGs (which is a compression) then you can also choose how big the file size is based on the compression and photo dimension.

note, the recommendation to use .png files (portable network graphics) is not as good a choice. PNGs are bit mapped, no compression at all, each bit on the picture has a defined parameter. JPEGs potentially give you the ability to make a larger dimension picture still fit within 700K.

If iBoats resolves this by having pictures automatically be resized, we, as users, lose pretty much all control over how much detail we can post. The way the forum software is setup is pretty damn forgiving right now. Just has be <700k.

 

[bruceb58]

note, the recommendation to use .png files (portable network graphics) is not as good a choice. PNGs are bit mapped, no compression at all, each bit on the picture has a defined parameter. JPEGs potentially give you the ability to make a larger dimension picture still fit within 700K.

PNG files are indeed compressed. For a forum, there isn't a good reason to use png over a jpg or vice versa.