Photobucket Account Restricted What to do?

[gmat]

Photobucket has changed the terms of their service and all of my old stored pics can no longer be accessed. What is a good service to switch to? Unfortunately, most of old photos were lost over several HD mishaps. So Photobucket has many of my best pictures. Currently photos stored on my computer date from Feb 15, but I have another HD but it's on my old computer that doesn't work. 

I've seen suggestions on other forums but as I would mostly post here, what do you suggest. Can one post pictures here from my desktop?

 

Thank you,

Grant

[miyakoji]

gmat I'm sorry to hear about this. I always enjoy you railway photography. I've been googling around for info on this, I see some complaining, but less than I expected. If there were more uproar, maybe they'd go back on the change. The only thought that comes to mind right now is to keep track of your credentials in case they re-enable access.

[Densha]

Grant,

 

Can you really not access your pictures in your account at all, or do they only not show up around the internet? The latter is the only thing I've heard happening so far.

 

And what about pulling the hard disk from your old computer and trying to access it with another computer? If the hard disk itself is not broken that could help to retrieve your old pics.

 

I really suggest to not rely too much on these kind of services. Always have a proper set of two physical back ups: one at home, and in case your hard disk dies, gets stolen or something happens to your house, preferably one at an off-site location as well (at a family member's or friend's house for example). For real-time 'back-up' Dropbox or Google Drive also work fairly well as they're rather reliable services, but you absolutely should regularly back up physically as well.

 

As for how to get pictures to show up on JNS, you can just upload them as an attachment to a post or upload them into the gallery. Many other forums also have options like this, which makes the pictures showing up on forums independent from (unreliable) services like Photobucket.

[gmat]

Thanks, Miyakoji.

The reason that I haven't been posting pictures is that the last time that I uploaded photos to photobucket, something ate up all of my remaining space and it has remained full since then. Once I get things sorted out, I'd like to post photos here again. But, perhaps all other free image hosting sites will follow suit. 

 

Grant

[gmat]

Densha, 

Copied from another forum with a more active discussion. The common feeling is deleting their accounts.

 

Below is copied from their web site.

Types of Accounts, Pricing and Limits

• Visiting : There is no cost to visit the Site or to register as a Member.
• Free account : Each individual Member gets one free account that provides 2 GB of free storage or space available for your original photo files, or videos under 10min. The free account does not allow any image linking or 3rd party image hosting. If a free account Member exceeds their Content Limit, their account will be immediately suspended and they will need to become a “Paying Member” (defined below) in order to continue accessing their account. You can upgrade to a Plus account at any time.
• Ad-free Account : The Ad-free Account offers Members the ability to use the Site without seeing any third party banner advertisements when logged into your Ad-free Account (note, viewers of your images within Photobucket will see ads unless they, too, have Plus accounts and you will continue to see Photobucket offers and announcements). This account level is available for $2.49 / month, payable by the Member on a monthly recurring basis.
• Plus Account : The Plus Account offers several paid options that may give the Paying Member more storage, bandwidth, 3rd party image hosting, image linking and/or other services as outlined below. Once and during such period of time in which you subscribe to and pay for a Plus Account, we will consider you a "Paying Member." Please note that all Plus Account subscriptions are billed annually at the commencement of the service. Photobucket may also offer a monthly billing option for its Plus Accounts (see terms and restrictions, below).

• Available Plus Account Plans : Photobucket offers the following Plus Account Plans:

o Plus 50 Plan: 52 GB of Storage for $59.99 / Year. The Plus 50 Plan does not allow any image linking or 3rd party image hosting.

o Plus 100 Plan: 102 GB of Storage for $99.99 / Year. The Plus 100 Plan allows for unlimited image linking but does not allow 3rd party image hosting.

o Plus 500 Plan: 500 GB of Storage and unlimited bandwidth for $399.99 / Year. The Plus 500 Plan allows for unlimited image linking and unlimited 3rd party image hosting.

 

In my case, I got the extra free upgrade that apparently exceeds the current free storage. 

Grant

[Densha]

Wow, this is ridiculous. It's basically making money out of locking people out of their account...

Edited July 1, 2017 by Densha

[gmat]

Yes, it is.  I feel that photobucket knew that if they gave advanced warning of their intentions, there would have been a mass migration away from them with little to gain.

I don't see the will in reigning in such business tactics from our leaders.

 

Grant

[cteno4]

Grant,

 

Sorry to hear this. Most of these services have done the bait and switch as they could not be free and ad driven for ever for the big accounts. Amazon had given me unlimited cloud space for the last few yaars and while they did not say it was free forever the way it kept sounding was that they were going to keep it free for premium customers... well maybe I'm not premo but they just whacked it all back last month. To their credit they are giving 6 months warning.

 

I guess the only way to get it out of photobucket is to pay the price of a year, ransom basically. Interesting they are charging more for using photobucket to embed images elsewhere, first time I've see that on a hosing service.

 

Have you contacted them to see if it's possible to get access to get things below the 2gb limit?

 

What was your old computer? If it's a fairly standard Sata hard drive in it you can get a pretty inexpensive (usually $20 or less) box and power supply for it to turn it into a USB drive. Then you need a bit of software to mount the drive at times to move things off. I've also seen bare bone ones w.o a box and just the wiring harness, USB board and power supply even cheaper to just get stuff off drives.

 

External USB hard drives are now dirt cheap and a good option to use as extra storage like this and for whol system backup drives. I saw a name brand 1tb pocket drive the other day on sale for $30.

 

Densha is spot on backups save your butt and keep Murphy at bay as problems always seem to happen when there are no backups!

 

I'm also wondering if your account is locked as you maybe have a lot of images embedded with links to photobucket here on the forum that is causing the free service breach. It's always fine to attach (upload) any of your own photos here on the forum in the future. The down side of embedding is if you change services for your storage then all the links get broken to photos you've embedded out there on forums and such.

 

Good luck,

 

Jeff

[gmat]

Jeff, 

Thank you for your advice. I haven't contacted them yet. But my account is locked not because of the number of images linked but because the number of images stored on photobucket totals more than 2 GB. Since I'd have to get the most expensive plus account to be able to link to third parties, the only reason to retain my account is to salvage old photos that I lost when my HDs died.  I didn't want to have my old links terminated so I never deleted old images on photobucket but added images until I reached my limit. Previously photobucket would periodically have an offer to raise the amount of free storage and I would then save more images. The last time I tried to add more images, photobucket seemed to have automatically duplicated my images and there went all of my free storage. I stopped using photobucket since then but never decided on a new server. That's why I haven't posted any new images for a while.

 

Concerning my lost HDs, in 2011 during the earthquake, my Mac Pro died. My images were stored in the Mac start up HD rather than on my other HDs, so when Apple fixed my Mac Pro, they wiped Mac HD clean and there went my images. Then a couple of years later, the HD that I stored my images on after that died. I didn't have them saved on another HD and didn't realize that the HD was failing. So there went images saved for a couple of years since 2011. After that I had problems with the Mac Pro not being able to use the newer OS so got an IMac as that was what I could afford. I didn't transfer the images to my IMac so those images are out of reach when the Mac Pro died and remain so until I find a way to get HD to connect to my IMac. It is a moot point until I decide on a new server to post my images. 

 

I had thought about upgrading my photobucket account recently but didn't. I would have to keep paying every year and what would happen if I couldn't pay. Something like this, I thought.

 

My problem is I want something for free and the industry doesn't want people like me.

 

I'll look at densha, Thanks Jeff.

 

Thank you for everyone's comments and advice

.

Grant

[cteno4]

Grant,

 

Might be worth contacting photobucket as they may give you access to ge kosher with the new 2gb limit as well since you have been a long standing user.

 

Yep free only gets you so far. I guess they figure the cost of the 2gb is equal to the little ad revenue they can get plus a little loss leader to suck folks into subscribing as well... free works, you just can't use it for anything critical and you just have to plan that it could go poof at any time on you.

 

Amazon has several offerings now for photo and file storage. Not sure what the prices or conditions are but may be worth a look as well.

 

You are an avid photographer so it's really easy to need ever expanding storage and sharing. I have a number of professional photographer friends and this is always a vexing issue for them. At least they don't have to worry about physical slide storage and backup growing anymore, that's a super headache compared to digital! This is going to cost you in hard drives or in cloud storage or a little of each probably. The more mainline paid services are much more stable in both price and service than the free/subscription services as those are sort of evolving as the market does (and that's all the time these days). Amazon got into cloud storage before it was a thing as they overbuilt storage early and thought hey lets lease this out to big customers and then they were already in the cloud biz when cloud storage arrived to the public. Google is another option but I always find they never seem to finish the last 25% of anything they do. I've found Dropbox a pain in the ass, constantly changing in plans and how things work. They also cater mostly to access anywhere and sharing more than good backup storage.

 

Getting a couple big USB drives for timemachine is really a must to make sure you don't have catastrophic losses. It can backup the system drive and attached drives. Then just swap the time machine drive out every week and store it somewhere off site If you want to be ultra safe. My main storage drive is a large 4tb dual drive that mirrors all data to both drive, so if one pukes the other is ok. Yes it cost like $350 3 years back (much cheaper now) but it's worked perfectly to ward off Murphy and been flawless for my Mac system. Time machine keeps the system backed up and the current projects backed up to large but slow USB drives. I mirror the whole big work drive once a month or so. Sounds like a lot, but really only maybe an hour of time a month and that's mostly plugging in drives and doing the offsite storage! My backup hardware costs are like 20-25% of the whole system so in the scheme of things not much and when it's all my livelihood and my personal data on that machine it's well worth it. I've had friends with dead drives that have had to pay thousands to try to retrieve clients' data and huge amounts of time and loss of face. Ironically most of these folks are super computer adept...

 

Sorry don't mean to lecture, but after 45 years in computers it's paid well when I learned early about backup options and it's never bit me in the ass yet and I've had projects with tens of thousands of dollars of data and media being processed where a disaster would have been catastrophic.

 

Cheers

 

Jeff

Edited July 1, 2017 by cteno4

[Densha]

Just a small side note to Jeff's last post. USB drives in general tend to have rather high fail rates and data degradation can also happen really fast with these. The number one rule is that cheap USB drives are not worth it all in the first place, but even more expensive ones tend to have much higher fail rather and faster data degradation than any proper hard disk will have. I've seen so many people's USB drives dying and taking important data with them to the grave that you shouldn't even try to risk it. In other words: just get a pair of hard disks of a few TBs for your physical backups.

 

Also noteworthy is that you make yourself a proper backup plan. You want to make sure that all of your backups are at least somewhat up to date in case one of them fails on you. You can make yourself a schedule for making backups on your external hard disks, or for real-time backups you could for example get a NAS system with two hard disks in RAID. Also don't forget to regularly switch out the hard disks with offsite kept hard disks. Add a reliable cloud backup service to that and you have unbeatable redundancy. You can find several other, and possibly better ways to do this on the internet.

 

As for cloud services, I am using Dropbox, but only so that I can access certain convenient data even if I'm from home and to make quick 'backups' of my phone pics. I also make physical backups of my Dropbox folder regularly to make myself independent from the service Dropbox provides. My (very large) DSLR photo collection is another story; I simply have a pair of external HDDs that I swap out for backups of this.

[cteno4]

Sorry when I was saying USB drives I meant USB hard drives, not flash drive. I totally agree flash drives are meant for very low impact use and should not be used as backup! That being said I've had a few that went thru the washer and drier and surprisingly survived! I did a bit compare of files and none degraded. Of course I tossed them, but I was very surprised. I've used them a lot over the years but only for device transfers and never a failure or file loss. Most of the material gets gone thru a lot with use and not found any bad files.

 

Jeff

[Densha]

You've had a lot of luck in that case. I've had plenty of them die on me or data just getting unreadable. Just had another case with a friend having lost their report a few months ago. That's what you get for working from your USB (flash) drive instead of putting your data on the computer and using the flash drive only for a transfer.

[cteno4]

I do tend to get decent quality flash drives, many times sandisk. I never work directly from them. Also they can go thru torture when out of devices with magnets, cellphones, etc in pockets, purses and backpacks. Many things have magnets in them that flash drives usually are not shielded well for.

 

I do have exhibits that run video from both compact flash and sd cards that have gone for years and years of playback, but it's a much more static and controlled situation.

 

Jeff

[gmat]

Thank you, Jeff and Densha.

  I'll be looking at a USB HD to back up my photos. As an aside, I really like Railsquid's Random Japanese train photos. I'd like to do something like that but my territory is more localized, ie along the way to my student's homes or more recently, within a two hour bicycle radius. And my photos aren't as nice nor thoughtful as his are. 

 

The only irreplaceable thing of value on my computer are my train photos, so it won't take too much time to back them up. I also download my sd cards after every shoot, which nowadays means daily and label them by date and location.

  That leads to some strange habits. Since I often travel by bicycle, I tend to shoot at crossings and sometimes alongside fences next to tracks. I will shoot the crossing names that most lines have. As they are in Kanji, there is another sign that often have the crossing name in hiragana. That's the one with info on using the emergency stop button. JR crossing signs are a good way to find out the actual name used for some stretches of track.

  So far the only line that doesn't have crossing name plates is the Seibu Line. I recently started passing the two lines by bicycle again. Previously, I labeled the info as "second crossing west of Ekoda Station." But since then had discovered and used the crossing name signs. After a couple of weeks and several close examinations, I found that the only information was on the back of the X-ing sign. It consisted of a kanji and a number. "江 6" would mean Ekoda 6th crossing. The system would start from either Ikebukuro or Shinjuku and after each station would start again with the first kanji of that station and number one. But Higashi-Nagasaki would use 長.

  Next to fences I would often shoot the markings on the telephone poles along with more useable pictures towards the direction of the nearest station or crossing. I usually do that each time I take pictures, which on reflection must make me seem very odd. I don't use GPS to mark my pictures.

  I also try to take at least some train pictures every day even when I don't really want to leave my room. Hence Shoin-jinja-mae Station and the Setagaya Line are probably a bit annoyed and confused that I show up so often and sometimes at odd hours. 

 

Thank you for your time and consideration,

 

Grant

[cteno4]

Grant,

 

Great habit to be into downloading and indexing everyday! Most photographers don't and the it gets to be a historical mess to figure out! Also once the number of photos to catalog gets a little daunting it then gets into the vicious spiral of putting it off for more time and then more building up needing more time...

 

Even if you store your photos on the system drive, having a USB hard drive to do time machine backups to is a simple and effective backup strategy.

 

I really love your photos of just all the everyday scenes along the ROW and even around town, they really are a fantastic resource to model from. Always looked forward to them!

 

Cheers

 

Jeff