Photobucket does not support 3rd party image hosting

Dear forummers
You might have the following problem as well:
Photobucket introduced new terms an conditions and does not support 3rd party image hosting anymore, unless you pay (price is crazy. IMHO).

Any suggestions out there?

Cheers Chris

I use servimg.com, it does the job for free.

I use flickr or just facebook.
Maybe one day we can use IWC?

Ah, Tilo- how long have we wanted that? I'm ever hopeful, but it just doesn't seem to be of importance. Just to be able to post a picture directly to the Forum... sigh.

Nelson

This a sad development that Photobucket is holding us all to ransom like this. A shame that so much history has now disappeared from the Forum and archive. Hopefully our Forum and all the other Fora can work a deal with Photobucket and make it more reasonable, or abandon this platform altogether and allow for direct photo posting.

Well said, Mark. I am fully agree with you. I think best will be to change to an other platform, respectively the very best would be to post direct to the forum.

Cheers Chris

Tonny promised it ;-)
I'm optimistic, Nelson!

It's sad but Photobucket has ripped the guts out of the Forum. $5 or even $10 per month would be acceptable but $400 pa is extortion and that could go up further next year. They simply do not want the business and the cost of the bandwidth and servers. Other hosting services may follow.

Oh well, this means about 100 images I used over the years are not available here anymore, rendering these posts to being about useless, unless you like my prose accompanying these pictures. Many members here used Photobucket, this means that the archive is less than attractive now, when you only can expect most of the pictures being replaced by that ugly standard message. Could this be a good excuse to get rid of the archive?

Of course I am not going to pay Photobucket. Even if some fee would be reasonable, despite all the advertizing, there is no fun in it for me to grant them that money.

So, has the IWC-forum a stance in this issue? It could be seen as a personal issue for the members, but the value of the forum is diminished largely by this action of Photobucket. I will not bother to do anything about these old pictures, but I would say that IWC would be well advised to come up with some decent alternative in not too long a period (a few weeks?), as, where is the fun without pictures?

Kind regards,
Paul

There goes YEARS of pictures across various forums I've posted in.

And I'm
Pretty sure that other photo services will follow suit, now that photobucket kicked it off!

Sad!

Well, if that is true, Mark, it is time to make posting pictures at a forum like this independent of third parties that Photobucket and the like really are, as using another party, having to spend a lot of time on the transfer of the pictures, may be only a temporary fix. The question is, is IWC going to facilitate pictures out of the device of the member, without the use of such a third party? I at least am not willing to pay whichever third party for posting pictures on a forum. If these third parties are going to charge for the storage of the pictures too I am going to remove them there, as such a third party is of no use to me anymore: I already have my own pictures, I just went to Photobucket to be able to post pictures here.

Kind regards,
Paul

Hi Paul,

I had a look at Photobucket's pricing and at $39.95 the numbers don't even come close to stacking up.

I run my own domain (www.gregsteer.net), with domain name registration at Aust$22 per annum and hosting at Aust$10 per month allowing both web pages and the ability to link photos. No doubt there are cheaper packages out there and it would be a significant saving on photobuckets pricing.

If IWC are unwilling to provide photo hosting space on their server a domain name registration and a hosting package could be an alternative.

A few collectors could even pool resources and register www.iwcforumphotos.com (currently available) and share the space and cost.

Cheers from the cellar

Thanks Greg
That could be an option

Well, I can share my pictures for free when using Facebook, in a very easy way. I see no point paying, say, EUR 100 per year just to share pictures here. All the more, where my participation at this forum was quite profitable to IWC, as funny me bought several watches I quite probably wouldn't have bought if I wouldn't have known about this forum. No regret about these watches whatsoever, but at least a full forum experience could come without additional cost.

It would be nice if a representative of IWC would comment about this issue, giving some perspective on what to expect. It really feels unpleasant knowing that a lot of time spent here, posting a few thousand posts, with about 100 pictures, is partly in vain. A possible action could be, to have pictures on an own server, and to make a deal with the likes of Photobucket to download the pictures used, making the forum whole again. But me not being an IT-expert, this would maybe be impossible. However, knowing about a solution would be nice.

Kind regards,
Paul

The photobucket pictures are lost now.
I used Flickr as image host, but maybe one day the same as with Photobucket could happen there too. Nowadays I use Facebook which obviously is the easiest. It's so quick to upload a picture there and copy the link.

But for the future IWC should consider hosting the pictures themselves. If it's a legal problem, why can anybody else do this?
And it's not terrabytes of pictures in this forum here. Really!
And the forum software itself needs some rework too in my opinion.
The navigation and load times are not suitable for a quality company like IWC in my humble opinion.

No, the Photobucket pictures are not lost, I still can see my pictures. So, by a "one time sweep" along the links mentioned, the pictures could be collected, if Photobucket would allow such an action. As we say here: "No is what you have, yes is what you can get". Something like "Hope does live", I guess it makes sense, along with "Where there is a will, there is a way".

Kind regards,
Paul

Hi Tilo
How are photos shared via Facebook?
I did not know this was an option.

[ul]
[li]Just post it at FB[/li]
[li]Click it there (magnify)[/li]
[li]Then with the context menu (right mouse button) select "Copy image URL"[/li]
[li]Paste the URL here in your post at iwc.com[/li]
[/ul]

Thank You
I tried that :o)
But the format is not recognized and cannot be read by the Forum software