Photobucket and Flickr a waste of time ?

topgazza

I remember a time when both programs were OK. Then they changed hands and the performance on the sites went downhill. Flickr closed my account down without being asked and couldnt find my photos...thanks guys. Now they see expensive against the service and quality provided. Does anyone still use these and if not, what do you use ?

snerkler

I got plenty of announcements that Flickr would no longer be free over and above 1000 photos I think it was, and if your account was over and you didn't 'upgrade' to pro then they would delete your photos. Not great that you got no notification though.

It is frustrating that everything seems to be charged or subscription these days, but I've got so much on Flickr now it'd be a pain to swap to something else so I just have my pants down and pay their subscription

topgazza

I was on pro at the time so very, very annoying.

On another note I assume to post a pic in AVFroums thread its still the  BBcode selection with a  photo ? Might get Pro again though as I suspect my account deletion was a rare thing.

snerkler

I'd contact Flickr then and complain, maybe they have a back up somewhere. Yes, still bbcode

topgazza

Oh, I did give them a hard time but the idiot on the help desk said becausethe account details were gone they couldnt recover the pictures and this went on for weeks.

However I found I could view the pitures through searching for my user name. So I was able to download the ones I wanted but not do anything with the account. Seems there are several levels of accounts. I was lucky. When I told them they still couldn't give me account access. Sigh

Johnmcl7

I'm in the same position with Smugmug but I'm thinking it's time to give it in as I don't have any professional need for the sharing and I rarely post images on forums now which is the main reason I'd taken the subscription out.  If I stop paying then all my forum posts with images will lose the images and I can never get that back however if I'm being realistic, that doesn't really matter as some of the forums I posted those images are long gone and the ones that still exist are quiet and no-one looks at those posts now.

On the other hand it's not a huge expense and it's good to have somewhere I can upload images where the quality isn't mangled even if it's mostly only my own use.

topgazza

It was great when the free element was useful for the likes of normal folk. And even when the subs were small for a bit extra functionality. Then both companies started screwing up. Photobucket was a prime example of how to piss off your customers.

But for now I store my photos on my iMac and back them up to an external drive.

AMc

I still use Flickr - as with Toby I have a lot on there and didn't really want to cut down to just 1000 images - mainly because of the effort involved, not because I know there's loads of irreplaceable gold on there .  The first year of Pro was also discounted which eased the pain.

I've never trusted it as anything other than a place to share my images across 3 forums where I post and sometimes as a route to getting pictures onto Instagram (FlickrApp>Phone>Insta).  I don't use it as a backup or archive, I only upload <1920 px images anyway.

I see that next year will probably cost me $49.99 (£40.52 today).  I'm not 100% convinced that's worth the bother.
I'm quite tempted to let my Pro expire and allow it to cut my account down to the last 1000 images, but I know that will be an obstacle to uploading new stuff as I'll have to go and delete to make space... I could probably register a new account

If you are starting from scratch then a new free Flickr account of 1000 images isn't a bad place to be.

If you only share images here then the forum attachments allow larger images than can be comfortably displayed in thread - the Mobile Phone sharing thread is full of massive, full size images that take forever to load over my broadband and when clicked show way larger than my HD monitor.  I've given up looking at it because it's so slow.

Doghouse Riley

I ditched PhotoBucket when they decided they wanted me to pay $99 a year to use it.

I've used this free site for a number of years.

Never a problem. I don't know what is the limit, but I've a couple of hundred photos on there.

ImgBB

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Snake79

I've been looking at online image hosting and asking the same question myself. There's been a shift in the way these sites operate over the last few years. I'm not necessarilly against paying for a service but it's more about what am I getting for the fee and does it work the way I want it to.

I had a Photobucket account years ago but never really used it. I have a flickr account now but haven't really been active on that either. I do use Instagram however I feel that is now moving in a direction that doesn't really work for me. There's also the issues around companies constantly trying to circumvent image copyright for files uploaded to their sites/platforms. Of all the image hosting/sharing services I find Pinterest the most useful, especially when sharing ideas or moodboards for shoots.

I have no need for cloud photo storage as I have a files saved to internal ssd, backed up to external hdd and blu-ray disc. Amazon Photos is used to backup mobile photos but that's about it.