If you have photos on Photobucket

[Garret]

Oh, those PC's just make stuff up!

Jeff

As a programmer, I can attest to that! After all, it couldn't be my fault...

[ron ll]

Crap. Thought I had escaped but my PB just blew up. What frigging a$$holes!

[ron ll]

This photobucket crap is really depressing. I fully understand why Spinner and others are staying away. I feel like staying away myself, although I'll probably eventually set up another way to host photos. But the thought that all of my pics from past threads are gone is really phucked up.

[J.Madison]

My threads have now bit the dust as well. I'm pretty sad about it too. So much work down the drain.

Every time a person searches a question about wooden boats, its this forum that is the top results. The pictures, especially on older threads, are a huge learning tool and an archive of wooden boat building in our era. In many cases, this forum is the only place online where many techniques are documented. I think the forum should host photos, as a direct furtherance of their mission. It is the only way to assure that the valuable record is around for as long as the forum is around. I also think this forum helps with introducing people to wooden boats, and to the magazine more specifically.

[jsjpd1]

I have started to go back and replace the Photobucket links on my Harbor Master thread in anticipation of them breaking. But I have to wonder how long the new links will last before that company changes the way they allow linking too.

[Mark Bowdidge]

FlickR are charging Professionals now in the same way that photobucket did originally. So you can bet that some time down the track, they like the rest will follow photobuckets suit or simply close down.
I think you can safely say that not to far in the distant future (maybe a couple of years), forums will go the way of the Dodo bird as Facebook and others are the dominate force now.
Our own forum has now been shut down and we've moved everything to facebook. Why? After the Photobucket fiasco, I'm not prepared to go thru all this again.

[signalcharlie]

I used to use Picassaweb, they got sucked up by Google and are now part of Google Photos. So I figured I'd stick with the giants like google, which also bought Blogger (blogspot). I put my photos on our blogspot Small Boat Restoration which allows upload straight from the hard drive, multiples at a time. When I want to share a photo I right click the blog photo, copy image address and then jump through the WBF hoops to upload them here.

So here is the blog post: Belaying Pins

If I right click the blog photo I can copy the image address and get a smaller image:



If i click on the photo first, the photo opens up in a different page. Right clicking on that and copying the image address gets me a larger photo.




Another Forum I like is The Sunfish Forum, the photos can be uploaded directly from files as long as they are not too big.

[WI-Tom]

strange, Toms photos was visible on my phone, but not on my PC. Can you all se the photo in my post?

Fred, I'm on a PC and I can't see your photo. I can see my own photos just fine. Weird.

Tom

[WI-Tom]

Perfect technique to show off the boat Never to much photos of Don.K designs!

You caught on to that, eh?

Tom

[stuckinthemud]

I use a free blog-site (wordpress) to host my photos, I do also post occasionally, but, its much more useful as an image host. I also use Flickr and Pinterest for photo sharing, but, I have copies of everything backed up, I kinda think its more a case of when, not if, they will start to charge

[Trawler Scott]

If you use Google Chrome add this extension, it restored the photos in my thread.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/d...fegnfnflicjjgj

[cstevens]

If you use Google Chrome add this extension, it restored the photos in my thread.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/d...fegnfnflicjjgj

Hmmmmm. That's clever. With a little work it would be possible to use that same technique to search and replace photo links on threads with a link to a new photo service, and transfer the image from PB to a new host at the same time. Could be useful as an admin tool for thread repair. It would be more work to fix quoted photos but that's not impossible either. With so many affected services across the internet it would be worth doing....

[David G]

The transition doesn't seem to be going well.

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/b...191026772.html

Again... I'm pretty happy with flickr. But as Mark B sez - who knows what the future holds for any of these sites? The alternative is to host your own website and store your fotos there.

[ron ll]

The transition doesn't seem to be going well.

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/b...191026772.html

Again... I'm pretty happy with flickr. But as Mark B sez - who knows what the future holds for any of these sites? The alternative is to host your own website and store your fotos there.

I hope the company dies a slow painful death. Slow, because if they just declare bankruptcy they take too many innocents with them.

[pcford]

Can you think of any other site on the web that forces its users to provide hosting for images?

[pcford]

Can you think of any other site on the web that forces its users to provide hosting for images?

Nobody has any opinions in this regard? Or just concerned about "repercussions?"

[RFNK]

I don't use any other forums so i wouldn't know. I just find it annoying that we can't paste pictures directly into this forum. In my opinion, albeit not a very informed one, it's to WB's advantage to have the many sequences of great photos etc. that members contribute and WB ought to facilitate them. If it really does cost a bit to do that then I think some sort of membership subscription is reasonable as long as it's cheap enough.

Rick

[cstevens]

I don't use any other forums on a regular basis either so I don't have a ton of experience, but I don't know of any that force you to use a third party image hosting service. I agree that it's a very unusual requirement and a holdover from the last decade (!) when data center storage space was expensive and not as easy to manage as it is now, with cloud services more the norm than otherwise. But as someone noted earlier, if we aren't paying for the service then we are the product not the customer. It's frustrating for sure, but there is no other venue remotely comparable to the WBF if wooden boats are your thing. Facebook isn't it and never will be. It's great for the social stuff but useless as an archive.

[pcford]

I don't use any other forums so i wouldn't know. I just find it annoying that we can't paste pictures directly into this forum. In my opinion, albeit not a very informed one, it's to WB's advantage to have the many sequences of great photos etc. that members contribute and WB ought to facilitate them. If it really does cost a bit to do that then I think some sort of membership subscription is reasonable as long as it's cheap enough.

Rick

The boys down in the bilge arguing about guns and politics understand how to host images. The problem is worse for the newbies....those that are just getting into the wooden boat hobby. WB should be encouraging these people. With the cost of drives these days, I doubt if the reason we have to provide our own image hosting is the cost of hardware. Do the the math yourself: how many typical images can fit on a terabyte drive? I figured it out the other day and the answer is a lot....(typical image is about 150 kbytes.) I am sure engineering changes would cost something...but I doubt it would be a significant amount.

This forum wastes a huge amount of visitors time; it frustrates newcomers to the hobby. Almost every day there are wasted electrons regarding how to post images. It is frustrating and tedious.


I would think the management should explain their position.

Thank you.

[cstevens]

The geezers down in the bilge arguing about guns and politics understand how to host images. The problem is worse for the newbies....those that are just getting into the wooden boat hobby. WB should be encouraging these people. With the cost of drives these days, I doubt if the reason we have to provide our own image hosting is the cost of hardware. Do the the math yourself: how many typical images can fit on a terabyte drive? I figured it out the other day and the answer is a lot....(typical image is about 150 kbytes.) I am sure engineering changes would cost something...but I doubt it would be a significant amount.

This forum wastes a huge amount of visitors time; it frustrates newcomers to the hobby. Almost every day there are wasted electrons regarding how to post images. It is frustrating and tedious.


I would think the management should explain their position.

Thank you.

I agree it would be nice to hear a rationale from the WBF admins. But one note here Pat - the issue is certainly not drive storage costs. I don't imagine that anyone would actually set up an image hosting server anymore. It's all cloud services. And those are beyond cheap. All of the images for the whole forum would probably cost around $250/month to host on something like Amazon S3.

[ron ll]

I agree that it seems it would be to Wooden Boat's advantage to encourage uploading pictures. But I doubt the problem is just the cost of hardware. More likely it is liability and lawyers and administration costs. Still should be seriously considered tho. A lot of general boat knowledge has been lost when all these "how to" threads with pictures went away. Over the years Wooden Boat magazine has been a huge contributor to the boat building skills being passed to the younger generation. But the photobucket fiasco just set that knowledge base seriously back.

[Peter Eikenberry]

I just checked my website and everything still works. I store a lot of photos that are displayed on my website, on Photobucket. I paid them to get rid of the ads, but I am not paying them for the right to display my own photos. I own the copyright to these photos, not photobucket. I also participate in a lot of forums. So I will have to find some other way to deal with that. But I have plenty of space on my domain to store the photos I use on my many web pages. I will have to see if I can store other photos there as well for posting on forums.

[PeterSibley]

Facebook might be a good place to host blog / build photos ? Post them there then cut and paste to here ?

[pcford]

I agree it would be nice to hear a rationale from the WBF admins. But one note here Pat - the issue is certainly not drive storage costs. I don't imagine that anyone would actually set up an image hosting server anymore. It's all cloud services. And those are beyond cheap. All of the images for the whole forum would probably cost around $250/month to host on something like Amazon S3.

Hmmm. I am no expert...though I did maintain a discussion forum on our local ACBS site. I finally discontinued it because of spammers...To your point... if my math is correct...a typical image on the forum is in the neighborhood of 150 kilobytes. A terabyte divided by 150 kilobytes is 6,666,666.67. A terabyte hard drive costs about $50. A one terabyte drive would hold seven million images of the typical size.

It would be good to see the management's reasoning here. So far, it is less than transparent.

[Mark Bowdidge]

Why should it be WB's problem as far as photo's are concerned. I means lets face it, they produce a magazine and the rest is simply something for builders to use as a complimentary service. Can you imagine how many photo's would be here on this forum. I got curious and then gave up when I got to nearly 500,000 photo's on our previous forum. We (www.bowdidgemarinedesigns) just switched over to facebook and in just one week, nearly 20,000 photo's have been posted. 1 week !!!

Lets say for example I created a way to have it on our forum whereby they uploaded photo's to my server. Very quickly its going to become full. (I reckon within 1 month). Once I exceed my storage space, I have to pay. Sure I could then charge my clients, but in reality, how many will pay. Not many. The problem is when it comes to boats, many want everything for free. Free forum, free plans, free materials, free advice..the list goes on.

Since we've switched to Facebook, our clients LOVE IT and ...every boat has its own build thread !!! So easy to use, upload pictures and when someone posts something, they are all notified via their phones..instantly.
Just caught a missive fish - click goes the phone - send - "Bing" goes everybody's phone - and the comments flow in immediately.
How do I do this on my boat? Snap a picture, "send" and immediately the replies pour in.

With forums, snap a picture - walk inside - download onto the computer - upload onto Photobucket - open the forum - paste the image code onto the forum and then....wait for a few hours for a reply.

Speaking with a lot of them, they commented that they HATED the forum. Why? Its all such a drama to load photo's etc and for the very reasons above . Compared to facebook and others, they feel that forums are nothing but dinosaurs. Its so old and agricultural in the way that it operates.

As for facebook...they LOVE IT.

Personally now looking back, I don't know why I didn't do this years ago.

Mark
www.bowdidgemarinedesigns.com

[pcford]

Why should it be WB's problem as far as photo's are concerned. I means lets face it, they produce a magazine and the rest is simply something for builders to use as a complimentary service. Can you imagine how many photo's would be here on this forum. I got curious and then gave up when I got to nearly 500,000 photo's on our previous forum. We just switched over to facebook and in just one week, nearly 20,000 photo's have been posted. 1 week !!!

Lets say for example I created a way to have it on our forum whereby they uploaded photo's to my server. Very quickly its going to become full. (I reckon within 1 month). Once I exceed my storage space, I have to pay. Sure I could then charge my clients, but in reality, how many will pay. Not many. The problem is when it comes to boats, many want everything for free. Free forum, free plans, free materials, free advice..the list goes on.

Since we've switched to Facebook, our clients LOVE IT and ...every boat has its own build thread !!! So easy to use, upload pictures and when someone posts something, they are all notified via their phones..instantly. Speaking with a lot of them, they commented that they HATED the forum. Why? Its all such a drama to load photo's etc . As for facebook...the LOVE IT.

Personally now looking back, I don't know why I didn't do this years ago.

Your post is confusing. (?) Who is "we". What is the 20,000 images in a week? Did you note that a terabyte could hold nearly 7 million images at 150 kilobyte.

Again, the management should explain why the attitude toward images is so strange. Does anyone know of _any_ other site on the entire web which forces members to search out their own hosting? My guess is that this is a policy developed decades ago and has not reconsidered.

[Mark Bowdidge]

Your post is confusing. (?) Who is "we".

"we" - Bowdidge Marine Designs

What is the 20,000 images in a week?

On our boatbuilding facebook page

[pcford]

"we" - Bowdidge Marine Designs

On our boatbuilding facebook page

Still don't understand if we are on the same page. Your Facebook page reports you have a total of several hundred images total.

[Mark Bowdidge]

We thought that as well, but a friend of mine explained that it doesn't count albums. Is only counting individual photo's.
We have three facebook pages. 1 is public and the other two are closed
As we have 84 members at present (more are coming across) on our closed sight and they all have an average of 300 photo's per album, that equals 25,200 photo's and... its just beginning

[rudderless]

More likely it is liability and lawyers and administration costs.

Other company forum admins have explicitly stated it is a bad liability to host photos. As an alternative, Facebook can be very hostile to users who don't login. It plasters a persistant popup that can cover most of the screen if your fonts are scaled big, even if you click for logging in later. Some of us potential customers consider Facebook a stinking swamp that we don't want to get involved with.

[RFNK]

I hate Facebook and would never use it. The WBF is great in every way other than its management of photos!

Rick

[PeterSibley]

I hate Facebook and would never use it. The WBF is great in every way other than its management of photos!

Rick

I use FB , it's been interesting with the brain thing but as a photo host it would work fine.
If WB could be convinced to support us.... Very Good.

[Mark Bowdidge]

With forums, all web hosting companies provide these 'platforms" for you to use. So as a company, you have the choice to provide the "platform", but its up to you (the user) to "blog' and find find a way to post your pictures. Not WB's.

Overall, it unfortunate with what Photobucket has done. A mate of mine did some deep researching and found out that Photobucket is on the verge of bankruptcy anyway. Who will replace them? Not flickr or any other company at present. Google may buy them out, but come back as a different name, but I doubt it. (Why buy a bad name. Not good business sense). But I suspect that either Google or Facebook will set up something similar, but utilizing their own platforms for forums.

I remember years ago when we set up our first boatbuilding forum. Within 3 years, it was old and clunky. So we created a new forum with the latest platform. Magic. Within 3 years it was a dinosaur. Then we started number 3. Well even with updates, it was beginning to show its age. Then photobucket did its thing. Well, I wasn't about to start a 4th, as I knew that within 4 years, the game was over anyway. Look back just 25 years ago, crikey mobile phones were a brick. Now, they're more powerful than the computers that were on the space capsule when man first went to the moon.

As we now using our phones to do more and more things, things like photobucket and the way it operates will very soon be no longer compatible. Maybe that's whats is actually happening. Incompatibility.
Photobucket no doubt saw it, and the only way around it was to spend big time to upgrade. Maybe in reality, it couldn't be upgraded and a whole new platform needed to be made. (Compare MS DOS or Windows 98 with what we have now. Totally incompatible with nowadays programs and systems. They just won't work and in reality, you can't simply upgrade them) Interesting thought

Now with this huge void coming just over the horizon, no doubt some young bright spark will come up with an idea and a whole new era will begin. As for forums, I'm betting that over the next few years these will be replace with a totally different format that is phone friendly and compatible with the new technology. Its call PROGRESS.

Just a thought

[RFNK]

I wonder who wrote that rule book? Anyway, I think I'm one of many who won't be posting any more photos to the WBF until WB comes up with a sensible way to manage photos.

Rick

[PeterSibley]

A photo from my Facebook page.