Photobucket is now Ransomware

[rkrenicki]

As I am sure that many of you have noticed, over 90% of the pictures on this website died today. It appears that Photobucket decided, with essentially no notification, to disable all "third party image hosting" unless you pay them $400/year to turn it back on. This is essentially ransomware, much like the recent "WannaCry" virus that was garnering so much attention lately.


As such, everyone who hosts pictures with photobucket on this site (or any other forum, blog, website, or social media) has all of their pictures essentially deleted.

We encourage everyone to backup their pictures while they still can, and move them to another site. I am going to see if there is any way to automate this process on our side (like I did in the DIY forum to prevent this from happening on walkthroughs), but it is very unlikely that will happen.

[thenines']

i GUESS I'LL DRAG THEM ONTO A FLASH DRIVE

[Wiscon_Mark]

A few years ago, I would have sung the praises of imgur, but I'm not sure they're not headed in that direction, too. Their advertising has gone way up and I can't say for certain they wouldn't try something like this eventually, too.

Still, it's one of the better, faster image hosting sites out there that lets you do albums.

[rkrenicki]

It is incredible how bad this situation has become. The fee is outrageously excessive as well.. I have my own domain with my own fairly high end hosting.. and one year of that costs me far less than one third of what Photobucket wants just to host pictures with lots of ads.

[Go Mifune]

I have a Flickr account which has an embed feature. Can't get it to work using their procedure. Where there is supposed to be a picture of my Subaru, just shows the embed code when previewing the post here on SLi. Anyone successfully using Flickr on here?

[Somac]

All you need from any image site is the direct link to the image (URL ending in the .jpg, .png, or whatever picture file name) and wrap it with [*img]picurl.jpg[*/img] without the asterisks.

I use Imgur for all my hosting for forum posts and pretty glad I do right about now.

[Go Mifune]

I use Imgur for all my hosting for forum posts and pretty glad I do right about now.

Thanks Somac. Just finished dumping all my photo bucket pics into Imgur.com and my MR1 is back to normal. The SLi forum is very important to me and want to keep it going as long as possible.

[Dead91silvia]

I havent been on in a long while and I have just noticed all this BS... I'm wondering if there is a chance of a lawsuit since just about every forum has been affected.

There is not a chance in hell I will pay for the shitty service Photobucket has been doing for the last few years.

[subyroo]

I have a Flickr account which has an embed feature. Can't get it to work using their procedure. Where there is supposed to be a picture of my Subaru, just shows the embed code when previewing the post here on SLi. Anyone successfully using Flickr on here?

Just be very careful where you store/link your pictures/photo's etc Mifune, I found the following 2 quotes on another Subaru Forum. Doesn't leave users with a whole lot of options does it, looks like a good business opportunity has presented itself for a clever business entrepreneur that is not into ripping people off.


Imgur is named as an alternative whenever it comes to image hosting services on the Internet. While you may hotlink to images uploaded to Imgur, the service's Terms of Service forbid you explicitly from doing so. What it allows is to use the embed feature, but this may not work in many cases.

• Don't hotlink to adult content or to file-sharing, gambling, torrent, warez, or Imgur rip-off sites. Don't impersonate someone else. Also, don't use Imgur to host image libraries you link to from elsewhere, content for your website, advertising, avatars, or anything else that turns us into your content delivery network


Flickr's future is not clear right now, with the purchase of Yahoo by Verizon, it allows you to host your uploaded images elsewhere provided that you link back to Flickr. Also, may not be used as a content distribution network for websites or applications.

• Flickr makes it possible to post content hosted on Flickr to other web sites. Pages on other web sites that display content hosted on flickr.com must provide a link from each photo or video back to its page on Flickr. This provides a way to get more information about the content and the photographer.

[rkrenicki]

I was able to locate a script that, after a little modification, allows me to recover all of the old photobucket photos by downloading them to the SL-i server from Photobucket. I have been using this script on the DIY section for a few years now to prevent hosting rot from ruining DIY threads... If I had used it as-is, it would have downloaded the little ransom picture instead of the actual photo.

For those of you who havent already deleted your photos from Photobucket, your photos should show up as the script is run. It will take a couple of days to fully catch up, but it is working on it as I type this.

It is also worth noting that this script is not limited to just Photobucket pictures, it will download pictures from any host and copy them to the local server.

[rkrenicki]

The script has finished running. It seems that it did not like Photobucket thumbnail links very much, so I need to figure that one out... It also appears that some users posts did not copy properly (such as Reason 's old 97 BD MR1 thread for some reason..), but the vast majority of them were repaired.

[subyroo]

The fix below does work because an Administartor of the subaruforester.org forum used it and confirmed it does work.
See Post #117 in this link for confirmation - http://www.subaruforester.org/vbulletin/f62/attn-photobucket-users-3rd-party-hosting-block-705178/index3.html

How long it will work for is anybodies guess, but at the moment it will allow users to get a copy of their pictures/photo's if they have lost a copy from their PC.



It has done a number on a lot of forums..
But because you can edit your post here there is a way of getting your photos back..
I'm not sure how long it will last for.
You need to put ~original in there at the end of jpg just before [/IMG][/url]
Hope that helps a few of you out..

[rkrenicki]

It appears that Imageshack did something similar at some point and nobody noticed. It seems that Imageshack just started deleting free accounts and all of their pictures after some amount of time from not logging in. I discovered this while trying to scrape up the "RSK headlight" thread for someone.

[Wiscon_Mark]

Yeah, imageshack did that a long time ago. I remember stuff just disappearing from there (but I never liked their interface or account management so I didn't use them).

[subyroo]

Yeah, imageshack did that a long time ago. I remember stuff just disappearing from there (but I never liked their interface or account management so I didn't use them).

To Imageshacks credit they give FREE users a chance to remove their images from their website before you had to pay, or your FREE account & images were wiped.
I can remember removing mine at the time.

[rkrenicki]

I did not know when it was, but the image backup script that I am running is kicking out quite a few errors as it keeps trying to download them. It is too bad, because some of the old DIY threads used photos with them. They have been erroring out for months it seems, but I hadn't been looking at those logs.

[Somac]

This is just a bandage for the issue, but to anyone else on another site that doesn't have as good of an admin as this one does, this Chrome plug-in (and I think Firefox plug-in now) fixes the issue of missing Photobucket images.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/photobucket-embed-fix/naolkcpnnlofnnghnmfegnfnflicjjgj