F**K Photobucket Right in the Eye
 

Thanks for ruining every good write-up ever.

So I'm glad you brought this up as I cannot explain how much I despise Photobucket...years and years of uploading my photos and then they decide to screw us over by disabling 3rd party image hosting...unless you pay those greedy corporate bastards...and whats even worse is their website does not even work properly...its super buggy...laggy and just horrible aggressive pop-up ad's all over the place...just a complete shithole

So how do I download 3000 images from their site back onto my hardrive? nooo fu*king way...unless you do the Android app album download. Can you believe that they wont even let you download your own images from the website!!!

So here is a simple fix I found online using Google Chrome..."for non Android users"...BTW this is copy and paste...this is not my info

Those who do not have an Android or want to do it on your PC can,
1, Get the "Photobucket Hotlink Fix" Chrome extension,
2, Export all your picture HTML links and save it to a text file.... photos.htm
3, Open the file in Chrome and press CTRL+S (or Save page) ...
4, select the option Webpage COMPLETE
Hope it helps others trying to download their memories from these greedy website owners

So for step 2 > select an album and then select an image in that album...once you do this you will see a button "Select all"...click it and wait for that shitty website to select all the album images...once all the images have been selected you can select the HTML links and complete step 2 from above.

Now I switched to https://imgbb.com/ works great, much faster than photobucket and simpler to use...and free

Wow. Hotlink fix worked flawlessly. I love you man.

:lol: glad it helped! :icon_tup:

You could do that at the start. I downloaded all my images and rehosted them on my own server. And it cost me next to nothing to have my own domain and webhotel for this, and also 100% control of the images.

How did you download them? I had no option on the website to download my images...and I don't have an Android phone to do it the other way...

They had a "download album" option before. I guess they removed it when they saw that 10000s of people grabbed their stuff and left the site after their price model changed.

yep I remember that option as well...but they no longer have it. Exactly as you said...they realized the ship is sinking and then made it harder on their users to download their photos...

Here's a plugin for firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...otobucket-fix/

These plug ins make all the difference in the world. Mods should mass PM everyone these!

So, you may have already noticed but effective 9 September 2019, Photobucket changed its policy for free hosting yet again. If a free account user has over 25MB in bandwidth in a rolling 30 day period, the image is not only watermarked, it is completely blurred.

No plugin or hotfix will address this issue.

On AusRotary.com, I have just managed to deploy a script which does the following:

1. Identify every image ever remotely linked on AusRotary. This includes all avatars and user signature images.
2. Extract and validate the URL of every one of these images, as well as host and filetype.
3. Dump this information into a database cross-referenced against the relevant post or user profile as the case may be.
4. Automatically download every image listed in the database and host it on the AusRotary server.
5. Dynamically patch the URL to every downloaded image to redirect to my locally hosted version.

By running this script I now have 80,000 Photobucket images hosted and backed up locally instead of being held hostage by Photobucket, no watermarks, no blurring, no chance of the photos being deleted.

As an example, check out this thread, composed entirely of Photobucket images but when you access the page it is dynamically rewritten so the user only sees links to images hosted on AusRotary: http://www.ausrotary.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=136083

I can run the script to back up all other external content to avoid this situation every happening again. I also hope to adapt it to query archive.org using its Wayback API to access and download every cached image that happens to have been scraped by Wayback but is not coming up with a 404 error.

I share this because perhaps this forum should consider something similar. My forum runs on phpBB, not vBulletin, so the scripts I have used won't work here, but I'm sure the smart people that run this place can figure something out.

There is a trick to bypassing Photobucket so that it serves the uncorrupted image, not the shitty watermarked, blurred version. Happy to help if the admin here require it.

If you have not we can contact Robb M. And see if the team can make that happen. That would be amazing if we could. So many of our threads here have been ruined.

I have not reached out to the forum administrators directly as what I have done will not work on the software powering this forum. My trick to bypass Photobucket will work however. I thought here would be a good place to make the suggestion and discus it.

Users can obviously backup their own photos - although they need to employ trickery to do that as well as Photobucket's completely fucked up platform makes it impossible to download your own files. However, it is way too much to expect that users will go back and edit all their posts here to point to photos in new locations. They have done far too much work for that. The end result will likely be that Photobucket will one day in the near future disappear - and all the photos with it - and then this forum will suffer irreparably as a result.

It happened with imageshack several years ago resulting in billions of photos being lost forever, it happened with Tinypic a few weeks ago (incidentally, also owned by Photobucket) and it will inevitably happen to every other image hosting service, which have become irrelevant and impossible to monetise in a profitable way.

The only way to prevent this is for discussion forums to move solely to hosting their own images and backing up everything that is currently hotlinked.

This backup process CAN be entirely automated and I have proven it.

On mazda626.net all images are uploaded to the site by default no matter what you as a user do. I think its a script running daily or weekly that go through all new posts, download the image, and edit the [img] link.

That's a great way to do it and the way I am doing going forward. In fact it is the only way. Many people hotlink Facebook or Instagram images, but they run off a CDN. This means when you right click on the URL for a photo on these platforms, you don't see the source location of the image - only a URL which is dynamically altered on a monthly basis so all the links will go stale very quickly. They do it on purpose to prevent hotlinking.

Rat Bastards!

i stopped using photobucket when all this happened and deleted all i had on that site. i just upload directly to here if i have pix to share.

I just deleted my account, Photobucket sucks.

I've been using www.imgur.com for the last couple years and it's been working awesome for me. Photobucket lost all of my old build thread pictures here on the forum, and even with a paid subscription, their site was horribly slow. Theybtheybwas like $500 per year to be able to share photos to forums. They can shove their site in the trash.

Mazdas24/7 will host em too. I've had most of my car pics there for over a decade.

A while back, we where asked what new features we would like to see on rx7Club. Mt suggestion was an image repository. Wonder what ever happened to this?

KYPREO - Nice work on the image scripting. I'm a web developer (C# .Net Core, SQL, Razor, Javascript, etc...) and know how much time something like this takes.

Thanks! Even longer for me considering I'm not in IT and have no education in coding. Luckily, I had a great script to work from written in PHP and utilising the mySQL database underlying the forum, which I then modified to bypass the system used by Photobucket to serve watermarked images rather than the high resolution originals. In the end the workaround was actually quite simple.

I am now writing a script in Powershell to go the next step. I have extracted a list of URLs for every hotlinked image in our forum database (well over 300,000). For every image which is no longer available online, my script queries the Wayback Machine at www.archive.org using its public API to determine whether it has a cached version of the image, writes the timestamp and URL for the snapshot into a database, which can then be used to download the archived images from Wayback and redisplay them on the forum. I've got a few weeks work to do on that project but it's already working for small lists of URLs.