Forums » Smalltalk » PhotoBucket (maybe) isnt the best for images

Attention everyone, If you use Photobucket to store your images.....you might want to save them elsewhere as its not the best option. I have noticed photobucket has begun to block images with too many views and not let you access the image until you pay them to upgrade your account, or wait a month or so.

Its something to do with too many views messing with bandwidth .

Does anyone know a safer site where I could perhaps store some private images? (kinda worried myself)

I've recently started using imgur.

thanks for saying this. iv been useing PB for stuff so i'll find somewhere elce

Photobucket is perfectly safe to store your images on. There are no security issues and you don't lose any images.

What happens is that every time someone views an image you uploaded, bandwidth is used. Bandwidth is the most expensive part of owning a website. So basically, free sites like Photobucket pay for you to display your images on a site and don't charge you anything.

The downside is that some sites may cap your monthly bandwidth usage. So if your images cost Photobucket 50MB (this is a fictional number, I don't know when they actually cap it) they will temporarily stop displaying your images for the month. If you want to continue having Photobucket display these images, you have to wait until the next month or upgrade your account to cover the costs.

There's nothing unsafe about this. Your images will still be uploaded but you won't be able to see them until your account is uncapped the next month. It's common practice for any file-storing site to offer plans and cap free users.

Heck, RPR has the exact same system - if you want more than 10 characters you're going to have to upgrade, because it gets too expensive to offer more free character profiles that consume bandwidth! Any extra characters you have after an epic expires also become locked until your account is upgraded again.

Isnt Imgur just a temp image site? I dont think images last on there very long

Where did you hear it was for a month? I just noticed a image got the icon replaced with no way to view it even on the account, it just didnt seem safe to me
No it doesnt? ...Photobucket blocks the image from being seen due to bandwidth....rpr doesn't block or hide user's profiles due to bandwidth. ...and thats what worries me.

http://support.photobucket.com/entries/21101931-Bandwidth-Exceeded-Look-Who-s-Popular-

It's always a good idea to check the terms and conditions of a site that you're using, because it usually explains everything.

RPR disables the ability to edit a character profile in any way until you've upgraded your account, or removed profiles to be set back to the original 10 profile limit. In a similar fashion, Photobucket locks you out of accessing/editing the images you uploaded for your monthly account cycle. I should probably have rephrased it to be a similar system, not an exact copy, sorry.

Oh, before I forget, here's a list of image hosting sites I use frequently and know of:

www.imgur.com - should last forever, especially if you have an account
www.tinypic.com - recycles images eventually, but it takes a long time for that to happen
www.imageshack.us - never used it, don't know how long images last, but a lot of people use this site

There's also www.picturepush.com !

tinypic is BAD....any user can report a image and its removed within 30 seconds of a report. So its not safe for images. Same with imageshack....

I utilize Dropbox. It requires a dash of finagling if you want to be able to link directly to your images--they must be in a specific Public folder--but it is otherwise more reliable, I find, than most other image hosting websites these days. It can handle your other files, too, and is free.

I have received some reports from individuals who were temporarily unable to view Dropbox-hosted images on my character pages, but these are minor, brief errors, unrelated to the bandwidth issue mentioned here, and will usually correct themselves after a few minutes.

This is true for almost any uploading website. I understand your concern, but it's always a good idea to keep your images backed up in multiple locations if they're valuable to you. Not one place is ever secure - even your own hard drive might fail unexpectedly and then you won't have anything unless you backed up your important files previously. Stick 'm on a USB drive, upload them to multiple image hosts or email them to yourself. You can always zip up an entire folder to prevent having to upload them individually all the time.

I've been using these free image hosting sites for longer than I can remember, and never had any issues with files being deleted because people report them or anything like that. As long as you upload images that fall within their rules and terms of service, you usually don't have to worry about a thing.

I've used PB for years. They've never given me any trouble. Where are you posting your links that you somehow hit the 2GB limit? That's insane.

I got gradually more and more fed up with free image sites when they started making it harder and harder to "direct link" to the image when you want to show someone. Understandable--people don't see ads or site branding that way, but it was really annoying to me. So I use a PHP file upload utility I wrote hosted on my personal site... I love it for most things because it's fast, and I don't need to log into my site's control panel to upload and view the pics. But sometimes it isn't perfect, and in those cases I will take the time to log in and just chuck 'em in a public folder on my site. Like http://www.screamingnorth.com/images/heimdall

Personally I use deviantArt's stash for finished images and save what is unfinished on a duplicate Flash drive just incase I lose my orginal. It sucks to here this about Photobucket, that site is where a few of my friends store their stuff, best I inform them of this if they don't already know. Thank you for the heads up!!!

I use Postimage.org . Images are never removed due to inactivity.

I.... I just use my tumblr. ;

Also, I use Trillian for Skype (since skype is frankly insecure as heck) and gtalk, and just paste images in there to generate links. Mainly do this for WIPs of commissions/trades/art in general. Downside is they're jpeg, and I've had a friend in AU who couldn't view 'em (once, dunno if they could ever before). No idea if they expire!

Can a tumblr be made semi private (like direct link only to view) but still be able to directly link images to profiles or a post? I just want a better back up, yet still keep some unfinished images out of public eye.


How can you make da images private anyway? I know there is a way from saving some images that went private, but how? Also can they still be viewed from direct link or not?
What about false reports? Also is there no privacy to that site for images uploaded? Never heard of that site and thats what worries me, never know when sites can go down for good...

I use facebook xD Just make a seperate album and put its settings for you to see only. Then you can link whatever you want to a character profile for anyone to see

Agh, I wouldnt put my images on facebook if you paid me to

In 13 years of using every popular image upload site I've not once run into the issue where somebody falsely reported my images just to get them taken down. I've also never heard of this happening to someone before for uploading images that don't violate the TOS, and I was incredibly active in multiple art communities that used these places almost excessively. I had images uploaded on Tinypic for 4 years now (2009) and they're still there, so I'm hesitant to agree that Tinypic is as bad as you say it is.

In my experience images are reviewed before they're removed, otherwise the image host site would suffer an insane amount of abuse from bored trolls. I wouldn't worry too much about images being reported unless you purposely start uploading things that are not okay with their rules. That said, if these images are really this important to you, back them up physically. Burn them to a CD/DVD, store them on one or more USB pen drives etc. If something ever happens to the uploaded images, you can always reupload them.

Just remember that no storage medium is ever 100% safe. If you have important sentimental photographs, they could be destroyed in a house fire or in a flood before you even realize what's happening. Websites can go down unexpectedly for a whole number of reasons. Hard drives can break in various ways and you'll never be able to get to the content again. Your image data can even go corrupt just by being saved on your computer - had that happen before, it's a bitch.

I wouldn't worry so much about finding a place that's 100% secure and safe and instead focus on finding multiple places with the highest chance of keeping your images uploaded. That way you won't have to worry about a thing, as multiple sites deleting your images or going down at the same time is far less likely than a piano dropping on your head from a 10 story building.