Uh oh, Flickr! Shades of Photobucket

surelyuknow

Tyme Master Jr.
Joined
Aug 5, 2014
Messages
16,423
Not sure this is the right place for this... If not please move it.

Looks like they are moving to the "No free lunch" policy...

Just got this email...

Dear friends,


Flickr—the world’s most-beloved, money-losing business—needs your help.

Two years ago, Flickr was losing tens of millions of dollars a year. Our company, SmugMug, stepped in to rescue it from being shut down and to save tens of billions of your precious photos from being erased.

Why? We’ve spent 17 years lovingly building our company into a thriving, family-owned and -operated business that cares deeply about photographers. SmugMug has always been the place for photographers to showcase their photography, and we’ve long admired how Flickr has been the community where they connect with each other. We couldn’t stand by and watch Flickr vanish.

So we took a big risk, stepped in, and saved Flickr. Together, we created the world’s largest photographer-focused community: a place where photographers can stand out and fit in.

We’ve been hard at work improving Flickr. We hired an excellent, large staff of Support Heroes who now deliver support with an average customer satisfaction rating of above 90%. We got rid of Yahoo’s login. We moved the platform and every photo to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the industry leader in cloud computing, and modernized its technology along the way. As a result, pages are already 20% faster and photos load 30% more quickly. Platform outages, including Pandas, are way down. Flickr continues to get faster and more stable, and important new features are being built once again.

Our work is never done, but we’ve made tremendous progress.

Now Flickr needs your help. It’s still losing money. Hundreds of thousands of loyal Flickr members stepped up and joined Flickr Pro, for which we are eternally grateful. It’s losing a lot less money than it was. But it’s not yet making enough.

We need more Flickr Pro members if we want to keep the Flickr dream alive.

We didn’t buy Flickr because we thought it was a cash cow. Unlike platforms like Facebook, we also didn’t buy it to invade your privacy and sell your data. We bought it because we love photographers, we love photography, and we believe Flickr deserves not only to live on but thrive. We think the world agrees; and we think the Flickr community does, too. But we cannot continue to operate it at a loss as we’ve been doing.

Flickr is the world’s largest photographer-focused community. It’s the world’s best way to find great photography and connect with amazing photographers. Flickr hosts some of the world’s most iconic, most priceless photos, freely available to the entire world. This community is home to more than 100 million accounts and tens of billions of photos. It serves billions of photos every single day. It’s huge. It’s a priceless treasure for the whole world. And it costs money to operate. Lots of money.

Flickr is not a charity, and we’re not asking you for a donation. Flickr is the best value in photo sharing anywhere in the world. Flickr Pro members get ad-free browsing for themselves and their visitors, advanced stats, unlimited full-quality storage for all their photos, plus premium features and access to the world’s largest photographer-focused community for less than $5 per month.

You likely pay services such as Netflix and Spotify at least $9 per month. I love services like these, and I’m a happy paying customer, but they don’t keep your priceless photos safe and let you share them with the most important people in your world. Flickr does, and a Flickr Pro membership costs less than $1 per week.

Please, help us make Flickr thrive. Help us ensure it has a bright future. Every Flickr Pro subscription goes directly to keeping Flickr alive and creating great new experiences for photographers like you. We are building lots of great things for the Flickr community, but we need your help. We can do this together.

We’re launching our end-of-year Pro subscription campaign on Thursday, December 26, but I want to invite you to subscribe to Flickr Pro today for the same 25% discount.

We’ve gone to great lengths to optimize Flickr for cost savings wherever possible, but the increasing cost of operating this enormous community and continuing to invest in its future will require a small price increase early in the new year, so this is truly the very best time to upgrade your membership to Pro.

If you value Flickr finally being independent, built for photographers and by photographers, we ask you to join us, and to share this offer with those who share your love of photography and community.

With gratitude,

Don MacAskill
Co-Founder, CEO & Chief Geek

SmugMug + Flickr
Use and share coupon code 25in2019 to get 25% off Flickr Pro now.
 
At least they are being "Up Front" about it.:dunno: Thanks for the HU, Joel.:hat:
 
Thanks Joel. I was paying $29.99 for ad free storage on Photobucket for years before they decided to ransom everyone's images. (Photobucket's current annual price $129.50/year equivalent to $10.79/month). I've been capped out at 1000 images for well over a year on Flickr, but I have several hosting sites I use anyhow. I think I'll pay the $37.44 annual cost to help keep them afloat. IMO that is a good, fair price for using an Ad free image hosting service. I can stream all the images of mine on TV when idle as a screen saver and would be a + having the majority all sorted under the same roof. Steve can tell you that the cost of running just this forum isn't free and it's something I never take for granted.

Paying Flickr eleven cents per day for what the Ad free hosting service is a no-brainer for me. How much is being on this forum worth? If Flickr Pro is worth 0.11¢ per day, how much is being here and WatchinTyme go by worth to help keep the lights on?
 
One more reason ... Flickr seldom flickers.
giphy.gif


**SERVICE DISRUPTION UPDATE 12/21: The majority of Photobucket Members are back online. We continue to work on getting all Members’ fully functional. We will report back as progress continues.**

We apologize for the recent service disruption that you have been experiencing these last few days.


safe_image.php


I'm in Tampa Florida and nothing has been restored here

Same here in the Netherlands

All my pics have gone here in the UK

We apologize for the recent service disruption that you have been experiencing these last few days.

We deeply regret that this happened and we are working around the clock to bring photobucket.com back online.

First and foremost, your images are safe. Our number one priority is to ensure that your images are secure and we have several systems in place to make sure nothing is compromised.

We will provide ongoing updates as we make progress to finding the full solution. [h=4]What happened?[/h]
On Wednesday, December 18th we experienced a total power outage at our primary data center. Due to the abrupt nature of the outage the equipment that runs the site shutdown unexpectedly. The immediate shutdown resulted in systematic issues when the power was restored. Unfortunately, due to this unexpected shutdown, we were also not able to rely on our backup data center resources. [h=4]What are we doing right now?[/h]
The process is taking longer than expected because the security we have in place requires additional processing time. Most importantly, our primary focus is to ensure your photos are safe and secure! [h=4]What are we doing to prevent these situations going forward?[/h]
We are in the process of migrating Photobucket to a more reliable environment. The environment will give us more stability and help us reduce these issues in the future. Once service is restored, our primary focus will be on moving your beloved images to this environment.

We understand your frustration and sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

Thank you for your ongoing support,

Ted
CEO

youphotobucket-jpg.283192
 
There's a couple of reasons I'm having a hard time leaving Photophucket!
1. I have a bucket full of pics and in their current configuration it's difficult to copy them in bulk to move some where else. I could move them album by album but that would take days or even weeks!
2. I lucked up the past couple of years and caught deals with photophucket and got a yearly rate grandfathered in from a previous account. I'm still only paying $39.00/year No Ads until July 2020.
 
I moved all of my files (4,178 Files, 87 Folders 7.24 GB) three years ago album by album before they decided to take that ability away. IMO PB is too unstable to take for granted if you will still have the ability to download your own photos in the future. Was it a PIA? Sure, but I had too many images I wasn't going to chance on losing. My advice would be to gradually work on downloading your albums before July 2020 and the ability to do so it still there.

When I did all of mine I didn't hang around while the zip files were being generated. They notified me through email with clickable links the zip files were ready to download. I'm not sure what it is now, but the cap was something like 300 images per zip file at a time, but it depended on files and size of each folder.


How to download albums from Photobucket 2019?
Sign into your existing Photobucket account; highlight the “My Albums” tab, and then select the “All Albums” link. Click the album you wish to download from the list displayed. Click the “Album Options” link toward the upper-right field of the screen, and then select the “Download this Album” option.
 
I moved all of my files (4,178 Files, 87 Folders 7.24 GB) three years ago album by album before they decided to take that ability away. IMO PB is too unstable to take for granted if you will still have the ability to download your own photos in the future. Was it a PIA? Sure, but I had too many images I wasn't going to chance on losing. My advice would be to gradually work on downloading your albums before July 2020 and the ability to do so it still there.

When I did all of mine I didn't hang around while the zip files were being generated. They notified me through email with clickable links the zip files were ready to download. I'm not sure what it is now, but the cap was something like 300 images per zip file at a time, but it depended on files and size of each folder.


How to download albums from Photobucket 2019?
Sign into your existing Photobucket account; highlight the “My Albums” tab, and then select the “All Albums” link. Click the album you wish to download from the list displayed. Click the “Album Options” link toward the upper-right field of the screen, and then select the “Download this Album” option.

Thanks Mike. I've already moved what I really wanted to keep a couple of albums at a time over the past couple of years. I just need to go back and delete the rest.
 
IMGUR is also a good alternative to use. I've never had any issues registered and it is a viable back-up for someone who doesn't like keeping all of their eggs in one basket. Once you are registered under your account settings you are able to download your images in bulk operation if you decide to save them from IMGUR. My most recent backup was over 1TB or about 1,800 images. The compressed zip file only took a few minutes to download, they allow third party linking and it's super easy to navigate.
(1 TB = 1,024 GB = 1,048,576 MB = 1,073,741,824 KB = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes. In other words, a 1 TB hard drive has the capacity to hold a trillion bytes)

https://imgur.com/

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https://imgur.com/tos

https://imgur.com/privacy
 
I have photos stored on two different hard drives at home. When I'm posting here, I do it with Tapatalk.
 
Not using a hosting site isn't the best method for this forum. It cuts into resources. Hosting sites don't.
 
Tapatalk hosts the photos [I think]. I don't upload from computer.
 
Tapatalk hosts the photos [I think]. I don't upload from computer.

You may be right Bill, but I think when doing 3rd party the images go towards our forum server usage. :dunno:

We only provide two options. Tapatalk Hosted and your forum, if you choose 'This Forum', the picture will be uploaded to your forum server for third party hosting.
 
Back when the app gave a choice, I selected 'hosted', so I think it doesn't add to storage, but where is it 'hosted? I'm going to post a pic now and we can check if it is a link or stored here on our server.
 
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