I swear to Science, Photobucket is the laggiest, slowest, most memory-hogging website I've had the misfortune of using.

The site visual interface looks fairly clean and neat (apart from the ads), but it still insists on downloading 5MB per page reload/refresh. Photobucket is the epitome of website bloat (the eBay site a close second).

It appends the "~original" to the URL of every image you upload (e.g. example.jpg~original) which looks retarded and to be honest, I'm still not sure what it's supposed to be for. Though I know it's something to do with viewing the image in its original size which raises the question "How about you just don't F around with my images, Photo*uckIt? I upload, you host. End of transaction. Capisce?"

Uploading images in batch (e.g. more than 10 at a time) is a struggle. First, the usual slowness. Then the progress bar will proceed to "15 images out of 10 uploaded"... wtf? Wait a while, and it will say image upload completed... except a few images slip through the gaps and fail to upload so you have to go through and check exactly which ones.

Viewing images as a viewer, is irrational and incomprehensible. So you upload an image and want to share it. "SHARE THIS PHOTO" the heading says. "Direct" the sub-heading says.

"http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa16 … g~original"

Using my powers of logic and deduction, I conclude that this should be a direct link to the full size image.

Let's try it:

http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa16 … e.jpg.html

Why the F did you convert it to a html page. Why the F is the image small looking. Let's click on the magnifying glass icon... the image is now larger... but why the F is it STILL not the original size!?

I've just about had it with PhotoBucket's BS. I put up with it so long because:

1) They used to be good (years ago).
2) I've been with them a long time, so I've been with them a long time (i.e. can't be bothered changing/too much hassle to change e.g. fixing up/updating image URL links)
3) They were better than the alternatives, the last time I looked for alternatives (e.g. Imageshack didn't have the features I needed, plus they went to sh!t anyway).
4) I only needed one PhotoBucket feature: Upload in bulk, and with one click of a button, I can get a bunch of useful code (I mainly use the first two):

Direct link image URLs:
http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa16 … g~original
http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa16 … g~original
http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa16 … g~original

HTML thumb code (for websites e.g. eBay item description):
<a href="http://photobucket.com/" target="_blank"><img src="http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa166/username/albumname/th_image01.jpg" border="0" alt=" photo image01.jpg" style=""></a>
<a href="http://photobucket.com/" target="_blank"><img src="http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa166/username/albumname/th_image02.jpg" border="0" alt=" photo image02.jpg" style=""></a>
<a href="http://photobucket.com/" target="_blank"><img src="http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa166/username/albumname/th_image03.jpg" border="0" alt=" photo image03.jpg" style=""></a>

HTML code (for websites e.g. eBay item description):
<a href="http://photobucket.com/" target="_blank"><img src="http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa166/username/albumname/image01.jpg~original" border="0" alt=" photo image01.jpg"/></a>
<a href="http://photobucket.com/" target="_blank"><img src="http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa166/username/albumname/image02.jpg~original" border="0" alt=" photo image02.jpg"/></a>
<a href="http://photobucket.com/" target="_blank"><img src="http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa166/username/albumname/image03.jpg~original" border="0" alt=" photo image03.jpg"/></a>

IMG code (for Internet forums):
[img]http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa166/username/albumname/image01.jpg~original[/img]
[img]http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa166/username/albumname/image02.jpg~original[/img]
[img]http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa166/username/albumname/image03.jpg~original[/img]

IMG thumb code (for Internet forums):
[img]http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa166/username/albumname/th_image01.jpg[/img]
[img]http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa166/username/albumname/th_image02.jpg[/img]
[img]http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa166/username/albumname/th_image03.jpg[/img]

I don't ask for much. I upload images in bulk, website hosts them, and hands me the code I need to use the images. Simple. You used to be able to automatically get code for only the batch of new images you uploaded but that feature got removed since the PhotoBucket website redesign years ago. Parallels again to eBay here: website designers or whom it may concern trying to justify their salary. How about don't redesign the website. How about F off. It's perfectly good the way it is (was).

Any good alternatives out there that is suitable? Preferably not some short-term fly-by-nighter website. One that has been around for a long while and will continue to do so.

imgur seems to be one of the biggest names and has been around for a decent time (since 2009) while Photobucket has been existing since 2003. There seems to be online chatter about imgur being blocked from being used on eBay so that is a potential disadvantage.

I think this whole post could have done without the crazy ad hominem attacks against photobucket but if you're looking for alternatives, check gyazo or puush. I'd recommend dropbox, but they're removing the Public folder next month so generating public URLs will be a headache.

If you're worried about a service being around for a long time, I'd bet on imgur over other sites you've never heard of.

I use imgur (mainly for gifs) and so far it is working out fine. It does have 14 small-time threats with the four parent threats being Adtech (spyware), CasaleMedia (marketing cookie), Media (regular cookies), and Servedby (spyware cookie).

My artistic friends use Flickr for hosting photography.

"Parallels again to eBay here: website designers or whom it may concern trying to justify their salary. How about don't redesign the website. How about F off. It's perfectly good the way it is (was)."
Amen.
And yeah imgur, no-brainer.

Just signed up for imgur. Clean no-lag site and easy to navigate. While it can generate HTML image links, it can't generate them with thumbnails. More importantly, it converts the file name of every image uploaded into a random 7 letter/number string. Not only does it look ugly, it makes image management a hassle (I have detailed image file names for a specific purpose) and so, this is a deal breaker. I think imgur is more of a "image sharing" (i.e. "social media") website than an image hosting site. I'm going to stick with the devil I know for now.

I'll check Dropbox (forgot if my account still exists, got it along with the Anki flashcard program) and Flickr later. gyazo and puush sounds more like screen capturing software though?

Off topic but an ad hominem attack is basically an attempt to indirectly attack a person's argument by attacking the character of the person instead of attacking the argument itself.

Here's an example:

Person A: I think we should lower corporate tax rates to improve the economy.
Person B: I think doing that does more harm than good because [insert reasoned argument here]. Therefore, we shouldn't.

Person A can now respond in two ways:

Response 1: Nah, you're wrong. I mean, you're just a burger-flipper. What can a person like you possibly know about economics anyway? Your argument is inherently invalid because of your status as a minimum wage slave. Now go make me my burger, pleb and leave the thinking to the adults.

This is an ad hominem attack - the attempt by Person A to weaken Person B's argument by attacking Person B's uhh, Person. What type of job Person B has, has nothing to do with the debate at hand. For all we know, Person B might have just got his economics degree and in the meantime, he's just trying to make ends meet (e.g. student debt) at McDonald's. Not that having an economics degree automatically make one's opinion right, of course, but I'd take more seriously Person B's opinion than Person A, who, in this hypothetical scenario, is merely parroting things he heard from 10 seconds of Fox News instead of actually coming to this conclusion from his own extensive research.

Response 2: Nuh-uh, you're wrong you stupid idiot. Go eat poop, you poopy-head.

This is not an ad hominem attack because there was no attempt to address Person B's argument. This is merely an attack. If I remember correctly (before it got deleted), I believe Ashley Winchester's post falls under this category (lol).

Anyway, all of these paragraphs are besides the point. Photobucket is not a person/human, it is a non-sentient website and websites can't talk so ad hominem doesn't really enter into it.

It would be more accurate to call my OP post a heat-of-the-moment, rage-fueled yet reasoned, tl;dr diatribe rant.

The uploading related issue in my first post was resolved but as of this month, a much more significant event took place: Photobucket now doesn't allow third-party hosting e.g. embedding an image in a forum post no longer works and the image is replaced with a "give money to Photobucket" message. For more info, google "Photobucket" and "ransom" and "blackmail".

So the citizens of the Internet are enraged and basically half of the 'webs images are now broken. Forums, blogs, webpages etc... they're now incomprehensible. If you're a seller on eBay and/or Amazon and you use Photobucket for your images, then the same Photobucket ransom message switcheroo still applies. The salt on the wound was the complete lack of notice. There was no "this policy will apply 1 month from now" etc - it just happened.

I've been using Photobucket for more than a decade but it's time to admit that it is in the process of kicking the bucket, and they will soon join e-afterlife with fellow Internet veteran IMDB in who signed their own death warrant by closing up their forums. I certainly don't visit site as often as I used to.

Where to from here? I tried imgur already and I think they have similar third-party policies and there has been word that dropbox is on a downhill trend. tinypic is owned by Photobucket so that's one to avoid based on name association alone. Chances are, whatever service I migrate my thousands of images to, they will implement some crappy policy and basically kill themselves.

To paraphrase the Joker from The Dark Knight *sigh* can't rely on anyone these days, I'll have to do everything myself. Probably going to look at some cheap web hosting. At least I know they won't be screwing around with my images after I upload them, like Photobucket does.

Photobucket? Ho' 'bou' f*** it.

Use an S3 bucket on AWS. That's not going anywhere anytime soon.

I had a look at the website and from what I can decipher from its technical jargon filled description (e.g. is a "data lake" a place Amazon people go to swim in?),  it is basically an online drive (i.e. file host) where I can store anything, not just images?

I tried signing up but it asked for my credit card details, which I entered, then it asked for my phone number and I was like "man, all I wanted to do was quickly check how this service works" so I gave up after that.

Could I ask you how the Amazon Buckets work in layman's terms? Basically all I want to do is to upload my images to this Amazon thing, make Amazon spit out the direct links to those images, and replace my eBay's Photobucket's image links with Amazon's.

I'm also not clear how much I'm actually paying. By signing up, I have 12 months free, that I do know. I basically need 2GB or less storage. I'm not sure how much data transfer I need. How much would an average hobby eBay seller of video games and soundtrack pay? Here's the prices for my region:

Standard Storage    Standard - Infrequent Access Storage †    Glacier Storage
First 50 TB / month    $0.025 per GB    $0.019 per GB    $0.005 per GB
Next 450 TB / month    $0.024 per GB    $0.019 per GB    $0.005 per GB
Over 500 TB / month    $0.023 per GB    $0.019 per GB    $0.005 per GB

Let's assume that the one that applies to me is "First 50 TB / month, $0.025 per GB"

What is the "per GB" referring to? Is it referring to data transfer e.g. when I send you a direct link to my 1MB image and you view it, then in this case, the data transfer was 1MB? And if at the end of the month, people only view 999MB worth of my images, then I only pay $0.025 for that month? Sounds too good to be true so I'm probably misunderstanding it.

And from what I understand, if I create an eBay listing with one image, and I link a 1MB Amazon image direct link to it, I think what eBay does is it requests the image once (i.e. 1MB data transfer), and then it creates a copy on the eBay server so any further requests from potential buyers of that image will be from the eBay server so Amazon bandwidth usage should be even less.

Yes Amazon wants complete contact and payment information even for the trial because while you do get a free year of service if for some reason you exceed the free usage terms you can still get billed during that period. When I was playing with it for a hobby project I actually incurred an $8 bill even though I was free tier but that wasn't using S3.

In simplest terms S3 is Amazon providing you a chunk of space to store your files similar to Dropbox. I suggested AWS because of half of the Internet is now using it for infrastructure so its stable and reliable.

Pricing is a bit confusing but just consider the standard tier. Basically that says you can store/upload up to 50GB for 0.025 a month. When you upload a file you can get a direct link to it, which is what you said you wanted, and then have a look at the request pricing. You can (GET) access the link 10,000 times a month for 0.04. So for example if you replaced an ebay auction with a link to an S3 hosted image you can allow 10,000 people to see that image for 0.04.

Assuming you take down the files after you sell the item you probably won't have to worry about the infrequent/glacier tiers. Those are applied automatically by Amazon to make sure that only the most frequently accessed files they serve are placed on their best resources.

You can use this to estimate if you will owe anything during your trial https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

Thanks for the info. I'll check it out. My only realistic options right now is random paid hosting sites or Amazon and the latter seems the better option.

I reluctantly stuck with Photobucket for another year and after they recently decided to give the website yet another pointless makeover and more importantly, losing functionality, I moved everything to Amazon. It was a bit of a learning curve but everything's stable and working as it should be. None of that "direct link to image that doesn't actually take you directly to the image" BS that other websites do. The only thing I miss is Photobucket's automatic thumbnail link generator but it's not a big deal.