Photobucket initially courted me with a free picture-posting platform and now wants me to pay and if not will delete my history and library

That’s only been going on here for a couple of years…

Find a different outfit.

Andrew

Imgur works quite nicely for posting pix.

Mark

Andrew, I closed out of Photobucket and migrated everything to my hard drive some time ago.

I use Imgur as my online image hosting service now.

Much better but still free.

I find Post Image fits all my needs and is very easy to use.

That is Photobucket’s business model Andrew. Bring you in with free pic posting until you have a nice library of photos, then charge you later with the threat of losing all of your photos. Sneaky marketing, eh?

quote:

Originally posted by Uncle Grinch:
I find Post Image fits all my needs and is very easy to use.

+1

I've been using Post Images for a few years now and it's pretty simple. A really nice article was posted on here a few years ago outlining how to post to the forum using it.

For long term storage I've switch away from all the things like the cloud, photo bucket, etc. I categorize photos in folders on my computer to be stored on my hard drive. I also then copy those folders to a separate external hard drive and store that in my gun safe just to make sure my photos are all well protected.

I have tried, just to see how they work, cloud based storage.

Very limiting, and extremely expensive for my needs.

I have literally millions of photos.

I have some years with almost 400,000 pictures!

Sometimes on an outing I have 8 cameras being used by guests.

My main media computer has 8 internal 24 TB hard drives.

Attached to it via Thunderbolt and USB 5 RAID-5 drives each with 72 TB.

And another one with 96 TB.

A Network drives each array has 96 TB too.

All the RAID drives are set as RAID 5.

This means my media is safe if a single drive gives up the ghost.

I have had only one drive do this in the past.

All I did was replace it with a new one and the system builds it back.

It takes several days, but works.

We are actually lucky today as formats are standard.

I remember spending months converting old videos to MP4.

In the past each compassed a different format.

From MPG to WMV and see others!

The sad thing to me was that I had a bunch there, and unless I paid them I couldn’t even look at what was there to decide what to do.

While I think I have those photos saved elsewhere, I don’t remember what they were.

I do know I had some older hunt reports there…

I am very surprised you all do not save your valuable photos at home.

Portable USB hard drives are not expensive.

quote:

Originally posted by Saeed:
I am very surprised you all do not save your valuable photos at home.

Portable USB hard drives are not expensive.

That’s precisely the way I do it. I don’t trust the cloud for anything.

Not that I’m any kind of computer genius. But about 20 years ago, I had the benefit of some great computer advice from a bona fide tech wizard.

Since then, I’ve had local hard drive back up for everything, and plus I’ve had back up for my back up.

Not as much as you, Saeed, but enough for my needs. Nothing in the cloud.

I have both the downloaded to computer files on a stick and the original camera memory card…. But there are several hundred photos from each hunt and I have no idea which ones got shared.

The idea being it’s easier to send someone a link to a hunt report or list the photos by link in an email than to add the photo to an email and end up having the email rejected by the server due to excessive size.

I’ve not lost the originals as much as I lost my selection and editing.