Hosting of photos?

Now that Photobucket has closed the third party hosting of photos, what is the best free alternative?

$399.99 a year so I can have third party hosting, yeah good luck with that.

I'm not sure that I have the strength to retroactively move all my post pics to a new host. I (we) are open to suggestions about where to store photos for upcoming posts.

I usually use servimg when I post on the forum. It's what comes up when you click the image icon when you're typing a post. (or at least it does for me.) I tried it for one of my blogs and it worked well there too.

I'm looking for suggestions for hosts too if anyone knows of any. I'm moving my story photos on my blog and I'll reupload preview pics for downloads if necessary, but any gameplay pics I posted on photobucket to share here, I'm not reuploading. I don't think I used photobucket for that purpose very often anyway.

deleted the post, no longer relevant

I still have all of my pictures saved to my computer and most of them backed up on my external drive, so thankfully I can skip those steps and just go straight up uploading and fixing links.
I've heard photobucket also has an option where you can download your pictures from their site all at once (or at least one folder at a time.) There should be a link on the right side of their site.
Photobucket definitely has to go. Their rates are ridiculous and their ads have gotten to be ridiculous too. I've already moved the pics for 2 of my 3 story blogs.

I have been using Imgur for some time....but I have pictures on photbucket that go back years and years.  My are still displaying though and so are my little videos of some of old houses.  I wonder how come are mine still showing up?  Stuff I posted at Insimenator yeeeeears ago.

Mine are still showing up too. And so are some others I've seen around. It seems kind of random.

Em Thanks for the tip on downloading my entire library from photobucket in one fell swoop. They zip 'em up and then give you the zip file to download. My images are still showing up in my posts about my 'hood. For how long??? The "grey screen of death", however, has overtaken some creators' areas.

I'm wondering if it's based on activity. I use mine for the sims I share and my Harbour story, so that's every month or two for years and years now. But I'm going to download everything. I am facing a serious amount of work! The first part of my Harbour story on my LJ is over 100 chapters long!

ilikefishfood wrote:

I am facing a serious amount of work!

Something to fill your copious amount of spare time???

Maybe more active users are spared, but I doubt it. On this site, however, older and non-updated threads seem to be suffering more. I do notice, however, that images used by Sugah for various titles (like the one just below this post) seem to now be the gray logo of death.

I don't know how it's being rolled out. I have two accounts because I wanted to keep some things separate for organization. Both accounts are really old. I don't even know how long I've had the first one. More than 10 years maybe? I haven't been very actively lately. A few months ago I logged in for the first time in maybe a year. I was shocked by the number of ads. Who knows, but I assume it will come around to all of us eventually.

Wow, 100 pages! That will be a job. I uploaded my original Arrendale Heights episodes to a website, because I thought it would be easier. I already gad pages put together and I could upload in bulk. I'm not sure how many pages it was, but I estimated it was about 2000 pictures. It went fairly quickly except for few hiccups, one being that I didn't realize the host blocks certain words or phrases and it took me awhile to figure out why those pages wouldn't load.

I've been slowly downloading folders all day. Unfortunately, I'm a categorizing freak so there a (it seems to be) a bazillion folders! **sigh**

It looks like Photobucket has gone and done it. Once I've decided on a new pic host, I will have a lot of work to do!


(And then, when you've retrieved all your photos from Photobucket, I would suggest cancelling your account with them)

I had two accounts with them because at some point I decided I wanted to organize things separately.  I never even used 10% of the space on both combined.  I went ahead and deleted the second one after I moved my storytelling pictures.  The nice thing about cancelling the account is they ask why you're closing your account, so I wrote them a nice long paragraph about it.

I'm not closing my original one yet (that I've had since 2004!), because it's the one that I've used for gameplay posts on the forums and it'll be sad when all of those image links break.  I'll probably have to delete the threads.  (I kind of want to see how long it takes for them to block my photos.  Because my pics still seem to be showing up.)  I just went through the forum and fixed all of the images for my download posts, so those should be okay.  

Oh, funny thing is, after I submitted the request to cancel my one account, then I got an e-mail about 3rd party hosting going away.  Go figure!

My pictures are all gone now AND I just realized that we used a standard download image for our offerings, and that image was stored on Photobucket. Now that the download image has disappeared, it deleted the link with it!!! ALL of our download links are gone!!!

Toni the disappearing images may have more to do with the forum, Then Photobuctet. Forumotion recently added a new option to their settings which makes it so all photobucket images are hidden by default. It can be changed, But only by an Admin of the forum.

Aaroneous wrote:

Toni the disappearing images may have more to do with the forum, Then Photobuctet. Forumotion recently added a new option to their settings which makes it so all photobucket images are hidden by default. It can be changed, But only by an Admin of the forum.

OOOooOOO...only Sugah can do that I'm afraid. Thanks for the heads up!

I noticed that when I was checking some of my threads. It looked like the links were automatically changed to me. I assumed it was done by forumotion, but that's interesting that it's an option that admins could choose to turn the feature on or off.

If you go in and edit your threads, is the coding still there? It was when I checked some of my threads. If you can reupload the download image, you can go through and manually change the links to the image on your own posts . . . or more simply just change it to text. That works for people that are still active, but for the creators that are no longer active, the links are going to be lost until an admin or mod can go in and update the posts. That won't be a fun job.

Actually, if you use the 'quote' button on the original post...you see the original text as entered, so we can retrieve download links that way.  

The text for the images have all been changed to https://2img.net/i/fa/pbucket.gif...I assume that's the forum's automatic feature kicking in.  Hopefully if Sugah decides to turn it off, we can retrieve the direct links for the retired contributors' photos.  This would allow us to download them and re-upload to another photo sharing site.  Fingers crossed!

Interestingly, I noticed Elle was not using photobucket and had her own download image, so her contributions (at least the more recent ones) are displaying and downloadable.  She uses a site called Smug Mug (it's a pay site)

I might wait to see if Sugah will turn off the feature, which should automatically put the links back, if not the image, before I go on a huge updating spree.  I mean, I do have to sort out the pictures, but it'd be nice if people can still download the ones that have pix (like my lots, objects RCs and wallpapers).

Quote :

Actually, if you use the 'quote' button on the original post...you see the original text as entered, so we can retrieve download links that way.

Oh! That's a smart idea! And that's something anyone could help with for a quick fix.

Quote :

The text for the images have all been changed to https://2img.net/i/fa/pbucket.gif...I assume that's the forum's automatic feature kicking in.

I noticed that when I went to look at one of my old challenge threads either before or after I finally deleted both of my photobucket accounts for good. It threw me for a second before I figured out what was going on.

I didn't delete my photobucket account. All my pictures are still there. It's just the sharing capability that's gone. Are we going to lose the storage facility too? I have downloaded everything just in case.

No. I just deleted mine out of protest since I have my photos stored offline too. You should still be able to use photobucket for storage.

I totally understand!

I'm not going to try to move my photos in my game threads, so those will just be gone. I forgot about my gifts, though. My latest, the dorm, was posted after we knew what photobucket was doing, and I used Flickr for the images. I'm sure the download links are fine because I didn't use an image for those. I also changed all my uploads to SimFileShare.  You all have reminded me that I need to replace the pictures on the other gifts, though.

We will get through this!!!