I know some on here don't like Facebook, but it is free and I find it easy to use.
zstripe Rich, I don't know if You caught My post in another thread, but I had said that I got My msg. in spam. I believe You should have got Yours there too. I believe You have G-Mail.........No I'm thinking of someone else........Not You. Take Care! Frank
Rich,
I don't know if You caught My post in another thread, but I had said that I got My msg. in spam. I believe You should have got Yours there too. I believe You have G-Mail.........No I'm thinking of someone else........Not You.
Take Care!
Frank
Rich
Alton Junction
Ethics aside, I can't help wondering why Photobucket did this so suddenly and unexpectedly. There was no advanced notice on the web site. The change was immediate. I never did get any notice whatsoever, no email, no pop up notice on the web site. My account simply stopped working. Were it not for a comment by Ulrich in the Diner, I would still be unaware of any change until these Photobucket threads started appearing in the forum.
hon30critterBy the way, what the heck is going to happen to the MR Photo Galleries?
Hi, Dave
As near as I can tell, the Kalmbach Photo Galleries images are stored on THEIR servers. If you click on submit a photo it takes you through an upload process.
http://cs.trains.com/p/help.aspx#media
I have not done it personally but I may give it a go here soon...
Ed
BigDaddy i think we left ethics behind in the last century.
Hi Henry:
Unfortunately I think that the human condition has always given rise to unethical behaviour. I still choose to hope however that there are others out there like me who place a high value on ethical behaviour. In fact I think we are the silent majority, and that's the whole problem!
Sorry Steven if I'm over the line.
Dave
I'm just a dude with a bad back having a lot of fun with model trains, and finally building a layout!
Hi Frank:
I've got everything saved on my hard drive too, and I use Norton to backup my files which it does daily I believe (I said I was a dinosaur!). I also copy my pictures and my important files like my layout plan onto CDs as well.
I think what really has me disappointed with this whole PB fiasco is that almost all of our old posts with pictures in them will be rendered next to useless. I'm debating how much work I want to do to go back through my old posts, figure out which photos are missing, and then replace them from a new photo hosting site. That will get old really fast!
One way to get around this might be to have forum members ask to have specific photos re-posted by posting a request in the original thread and also via a PM so the original poster will be sure to see the request. At least by doing that we would only need to repost those pictures that are requested. Maybe Steven could add a sticky to the General Discussion forum suggesting something like that.
By the way, what the heck is going to happen to the MR Photo Galleries?
Dave,
I have a fairly large memory on My PC.....I only had 480 pic's with PB and it only took Me less than 5minutes to download My entire album to My hard drive to a zip folder. All my pic's remain on My hard drive until I delete them. I can put them on any free hosting site that I want. If the free hosting site goes belly up and the pic's there are no longer accessible....I still have them on My hard drive. I choose to give IMGUR a shot and found that it is, (to Me, anyway) one of the easiest to use. All I do is go to My image folder click on a pic,' I use direct, click on it and it copys..go to the MR site click on the icon with the picture, insert My img...press ok and the pic shows up immediately......I can still type anything I want after the img...just click enter first.
I have shared a couple pic's to their community photo sharing and have already recieved quite a few comments and questions about the pic's.....as far as where I got the models from and what scale they are etc. I found that interesting, because it appears there are some modeler's on that site, that would appreciate help in finding things that they didn't know exsisted as far as modeling is concerned. One of the pic's was My tug boat.
Btw....I had a little longer time trying to delete My account with PB......almost as though they wouldn't let Me leave...LOL I also was a paid user.....but just got tired of them and their ways.
Yahoo is known for making bad business decisions. They are now owned by Verizon. I've been a Verizon customer forever and they have terrible customer service. It's not a combination of traits that will customers enjoy.
If 90% of people leave PB but 10% are willing to pay, they will double or triple their revenues and can cut back on the infrastructure that supports all that storage. I think it's more likely that they have over estimated people's willingness to pay and will lose money on the price hike.
Ethics? I don't want to get the thread locked, so I won't mention any examples but i think we left ethics behind in the last century.
Henry
COB Potomac & Northern
Shenandoah Valley
I am not a lawyer and I don´t recall all of the small print when I signed up for my PB account, but what I am aware of is that with my signing up, I agreed to the terms and conditions of PB, which included 3rd party hosting free of charge. Now PB has changed that, which constitutes a breach of contract to my disadvantage - at least for pictures uploaded and hosted prior to the date of changing the terms and conditions.
PB´s business conduct is at minimum unethical, maybe also illegal!
There are two threads currently on this topic, and after reading them I'm wondering if a more reliable long term solution would be to set up your own blog. A couple of people have mentioned doing that and they are apparently not subject to the whims of Photo Bucket. I guess you would be dependent on the blog service provider though so ultimately it may not be a better solution.
I'm a dinosaur when it comes to this stuff. Maybe somebody can fill us in.
NYBW-JohnI see nothing unethical about what they are doing. They are making a business decision.
Hi John:
What would you say if your electrical bill suddenly went up by 13.3x and if you didn't pay it your power would be cut off? Would that be ethical too?
I currently pay PB about $30.00 a year and things have been fine. That plan no longer appears in their offerings so I suspect that as soon as my plan expires I'm going to get told to pay the $400.00 per year. That is a 13 fold increase. If so, that will not be an ethical decision in any way, shape or form. That will be highway robbery. Just because they can do it doesn't make it ethical.
In addition to the price hike, they apparently don't give a hoot about the fact that they are negating the work of thousands of people. Is that ethical too?!? If you think so, check your dictionary for the meaning of the word.
Respectfully,
gmpullmanALL 31 pages And I was getting ready to search for a few building signs that I remember seeing there! Major Bummer!!! Ed
Yes that most definitely...sucks. That guy went through a lot of time and trouble to share those with others......and now nothing. No words to describe My feelings about what PB's business decisions are....but it appears to be purely cut-throat, with no regard for others......Sad!
Oh NO!
I just realized that Tom Kat 13's "Yes! More Signs" Pages are now all KAPUT!
http://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/11/t/162879.aspx?page=31#2959188
ALL 31 pages
And I was getting ready to search for a few building signs that I remember seeing there!
Major Bummer!!!
Thanks, Mel
I may play around with GooglePhoto a little more. I'm also trying to get a Blog-type page going at Wordpress. I signed up over a year ago, paid for a "premium" account but still have a long way to go to get anything "Web Worthy" there!
I see why people and businesses have dedicated web designers hired out!
I was paying the $30/yr for the Photobucket Plus-20 plan. I wouldn't even have minded if they wanted to raise the fee a little but their recent outages were becoming a real bother. I suppose the imgur and other free sites are OK but I see lots of down-side to that route, too.
Hopefully this will all get straightened out over the next few weeks and things can get back to normal... whatever "normal" might be
Take care... Ed
gmpullman RR_Mel I removed the app then spent two hours deleting pictures I didn’t want on Google Photo. I tried to upload new pictures this morning and they went OK even though I removed the app. So bottom line is if it continues working I’m going to use Google Photo for my picture host for Forum pictures. Hi, Mel I went through very similar experiences with Google (I was a former Picasa user), Amazon, DropBox and Flickr as well. One thing I'll point out is that these services are geared more toward a "Cloud-based" photo backup utility rather than simply being a 3rd party sharing host. That's why the app was looking for EVERY photo from your hard drive. You should be able to select which folders to automatically upload from. Also, once uploaded you can then select which photos (or none) that are available for public display. Regards, Ed I'm just as dazed-and-confused as everyone else here
RR_Mel I removed the app then spent two hours deleting pictures I didn’t want on Google Photo. I tried to upload new pictures this morning and they went OK even though I removed the app. So bottom line is if it continues working I’m going to use Google Photo for my picture host for Forum pictures.
Hi, Mel
I went through very similar experiences with Google (I was a former Picasa user), Amazon, DropBox and Flickr as well.
One thing I'll point out is that these services are geared more toward a "Cloud-based" photo backup utility rather than simply being a 3rd party sharing host.
That's why the app was looking for EVERY photo from your hard drive. You should be able to select which folders to automatically upload from. Also, once uploaded you can then select which photos (or none) that are available for public display.
Regards, Ed
I'm just as dazed-and-confused as everyone else here
I'll try this. I'm experimenting with recent photo of waterfall.
Hmmmm ... back to drawing board.
I did the curved arrow that said "share" and copied the code I saw.
GARRY
HEARTLAND DIVISION, CB&Q RR
EVERYWHERE LOST; WE HUSTLE OUR CABOOSE FOR YOU
richhotrain NYBW-John hon30critter So I guess if we close our Photobucket accounts all our pictures will disappear from our previous posts. Do I have that right? I'm also guessing that the only way to restore those photos to the threads would be to go back through the picture files on my computer, find the same photo, copy it to another photo hosting site, and then re-post the photo in the original thread. Correct? That's a bummer! To me, this is a breach of business ethics of the highest order! Dave I see nothing unethical about what they are doing. They are making a business decision. We as consumers have the right to accept their new terms or look elsewhere for similar services. Time will tell if they made a wise business decision. Generally speaking, when you start charging a consumer for a service that they had been getting for free, it doesn't work out well. No, it is not ethical. Dave is correct. It is a breach of business ethics of the highest order. No notice in advance. In many cases, including my own, no notice after the fact. What Photobucket has done is to hold its members hostage for ransom, pure and simple. Whatever business decision it is that they are making, it is not apparent to me. In exchange for free storage, members were subject to viewing ads. Advertisers paid Photobucket to pst their ads. That was Photobucket's source of revenue. As members leave in droves rather than pay fees, so will advertisers. So where is the business decision other than to commit economic suicide? Rich
NYBW-John hon30critter So I guess if we close our Photobucket accounts all our pictures will disappear from our previous posts. Do I have that right? I'm also guessing that the only way to restore those photos to the threads would be to go back through the picture files on my computer, find the same photo, copy it to another photo hosting site, and then re-post the photo in the original thread. Correct? That's a bummer! To me, this is a breach of business ethics of the highest order! Dave I see nothing unethical about what they are doing. They are making a business decision. We as consumers have the right to accept their new terms or look elsewhere for similar services. Time will tell if they made a wise business decision. Generally speaking, when you start charging a consumer for a service that they had been getting for free, it doesn't work out well.
hon30critter So I guess if we close our Photobucket accounts all our pictures will disappear from our previous posts. Do I have that right? I'm also guessing that the only way to restore those photos to the threads would be to go back through the picture files on my computer, find the same photo, copy it to another photo hosting site, and then re-post the photo in the original thread. Correct? That's a bummer! To me, this is a breach of business ethics of the highest order! Dave
So I guess if we close our Photobucket accounts all our pictures will disappear from our previous posts. Do I have that right?
I'm also guessing that the only way to restore those photos to the threads would be to go back through the picture files on my computer, find the same photo, copy it to another photo hosting site, and then re-post the photo in the original thread. Correct?
That's a bummer!
To me, this is a breach of business ethics of the highest order!
I see nothing unethical about what they are doing. They are making a business decision. We as consumers have the right to accept their new terms or look elsewhere for similar services. Time will tell if they made a wise business decision. Generally speaking, when you start charging a consumer for a service that they had been getting for free, it doesn't work out well.
No, it is not ethical. Dave is correct. It is a breach of business ethics of the highest order.
No notice in advance. In many cases, including my own, no notice after the fact.
What Photobucket has done is to hold its members hostage for ransom, pure and simple.
Whatever business decision it is that they are making, it is not apparent to me. In exchange for free storage, members were subject to viewing ads. Advertisers paid Photobucket to pst their ads. That was Photobucket's source of revenue. As members leave in droves rather than pay fees, so will advertisers. So where is the business decision other than to commit economic suicide?
That's why I said that only time will tell if it is good business decision or not. PB is a business and they are in business to make money. Generally a business will charge what the free market is willing to pay for their goods and services. PB had been making their money off advertising dollars. Maybe that wasn't enough to make them profitable or maybe they thought they could increase profits by charging for somethingn they had previously offered at no charge. Either way, they were within their rights to make that strategic decision. If their customers leave them in droves, it will prove to be a bad decision. It might be that they weren't profitable with their old business model and this was a last ditch effort to try to become profitable.
I've seen this movie before. My first ISP was a company called Prodigy which if I remember was a collaboration between Sears and IBM. This was in the early 1990s. Initially I used it a lot for a lot of reasons. It had forums similar to this one in which users could discuss a wide variety of subject. There were no moderators but they had rules for what was permissable and questionable content could be reported. The discussions were quite lively and sometimes heated. This went on for several years. Then they changed their terms of service. They put a limit on posting and if you exceeded the limit they would start charging extra. The limit was fairly restrictive and pretty much everyone in the discussion groups I participated in agreed that they would be unlikely to continue to use the service. I don't think they lasted much longer and PB might be headed for the same fate.
Hi, Garry
I'm fumbling along like everyone else here. Maybe others have better methods but this seems to work for me.
When your photo is "selected" click the curving arrow at the lower right.
A dialog box opens, mine allows re-sizing of the image, too.
IMG_8545_fix by Edmund, on Flickr
You want to delete all the text before and after the and the
OK... Well, scrap THAT idea!
In another thread someone mentioned that everything prior to http and after .img had to be deleted?
So here I am trying to post an example of the link but the photo appears anyway by using the entire link
BACK to your original question... just click on the curving arrow icon and choose BBCode as your sharing option. Then choose the size of the photo (I chose medium 800 x 570) then use CTRL+C to copy the already highlighted link.
Paste this (Ctrl+V)into the MR forum dialog and that should do it. IF you try to paste it into the forum photo dialog box it will not work unless you DO delete the text before http and after .img.
Good Luck, Ed
Fllickr
I just now opened a Flickr account, and I have uploaded one photo.
I want to experiment and post it here. What is my next step?. Where is the code to copy into this forum ?
Thanks
RR_MelI removed the app then spent two hours deleting pictures I didn’t want on Google Photo. I tried to upload new pictures this morning and they went OK even though I removed the app. So bottom line is if it continues working I’m going to use Google Photo for my picture host for Forum pictures.
I have 33,000 photos on Flickr but only a handful are available for public viewing unless I send a specific link with permission.
With Photobucket I uploaded very small versions (highly compressed and re-sized) of photos that I want to include in forums. These are in no way "back-ups" of my original photos which I keep on the main hard drive, and a secondary hard drive AND several of the "Cloud" based storage sites. I want to be able to retrieve my original, high resolution photo if needed.
Let me try a test with a photo linked to Google:
No joy here: this just links to a "New Shared Album" at PhotoGoogle.
Try again soon...
** as of today, 2 July, I have not yet received any emails of notifications from Photobucket and as far as I can see, I still have all of the functionality I had before.
In the Diner (last day or two of June), I asked Steven why Kalmbach prefers us to use a host for photos instead of allowing us to post the photos directly into the forum from our computers.
I hope Steven does not mind if I quote him . The reasons make sense to me, and I appreciate Kalmbach for providing this forum.
Steven explained: "Two reasons. First of all, we don't make any money off the Forums, so we don't want to have to buy a bunch of servers to host the photos on. Photos take up a lot more MB than plain text. Look back over the years this Forum has been around and you can imagine how much space this Forum would take if we hosted photos. Secondly, we don't want to be liable for whatever photos someone might want to post here: copyrighted material, inappropriate material, whatever. We don't have the staff time to police it all, so we'd rather it all be hosted elsewhere."
Checked through the options and went with Imgur. My signature's back!
_________________________________________________________________
I have no horse in this race since I do not post pictures here or on other sites. But I will say that it is unfortunate that some older (and not so old) postings that had excellent and instructive photos now are very incomplete because of issues with the original photo hosting. For those who do like to post photos and are looking for a new photo hosting site, give a thought to the stability and probable longevity of that site.
Dave Nelson
The sense of defeat/loss/anger over the time spent creating threads to help others and having them trashed by this new policy. It definitely takes time to create threads and if the idea is to help others and provide a service to the community, this is a kick in the teeth to that ideal. Letting go of that may take some time. The real cost here is the time it takes to create links...PB is making a play to try and capitalize on that.
Perhaps forums such as MR should start allowing photo uploads to protect the content of forum threads moving forward. MRH already does this. I’m not sure if MR views forum content as valuable enough to support it in this way and one could make the argument that spending $$$ on server space for content that they don’t review or otherwise exert editorial control over may not be in their best interest.
It is possible to pay for unlimited bandwidth hosting packages for what PB was charging for their ad free membership (or even less than that). They are a bit more difficult to use but definitely workable. By hosting your own material at your own site, you don’t guarantee that something like this won’t happen again but you do keep it more in your control – until your ISP charges more or changes its TOS....
Perhaps creating a database of PDFs made from your posts would be pretty cool. These could be hosted at DRWayne’sTrains.com (LOL) and free for anyone to download.
Here is an example from my site:
http://thewilloughbyline.com/willoughby%20text/Willoughby%20Yard%20design.doc.pdf
Just some ideas moving forward,
Guy
see stuff at: the Willoughby Line Site
ATLANTIC CENTRAL OK
OK
peahrens Guy, would you please advise how you adjusted settings in imgbb "settings" so only those persons with the link
Guy, would you please advise how you adjusted settings in imgbb "settings" so only those persons with the link
You have to "Create an Album" and choose the option "Private (anyone with the link)".
Modeling CNR in the 50's
richhotrain ATLANTIC CENTRAL Rich, I suspect the infrastructure cost to run Photobucket is way more per user than the cost to run AOL for example (yes silly me still uses AOL). At the same time, the income streams for Photobucket seem dramaticly more limited than those for AOL. Photobucket provides a more expensive service, yet has less opertunities to "sell" something. Advertising is advertising, be it print media, radio or television or whatever. People are influenced by what they read, hear, or see. Don't kid yourself that Photobucket doesn't somehow doesn't generate enough advertising revenue to stay afloat. Something else has to be behind Photobucket's decision to cut loose all us little guys, for it is not so stupid as to believe that everyone will stick around and pay $400 per year when the same thing can be had free elsewhere. For whatever the reason, it already assumes that all us littl guys will leave. Photobucket wants to jettison all us little guys. It's a business decision of some kind. Rich
ATLANTIC CENTRAL Rich, I suspect the infrastructure cost to run Photobucket is way more per user than the cost to run AOL for example (yes silly me still uses AOL). At the same time, the income streams for Photobucket seem dramaticly more limited than those for AOL. Photobucket provides a more expensive service, yet has less opertunities to "sell" something.
Rich, I suspect the infrastructure cost to run Photobucket is way more per user than the cost to run AOL for example (yes silly me still uses AOL).
At the same time, the income streams for Photobucket seem dramaticly more limited than those for AOL.
Photobucket provides a more expensive service, yet has less opertunities to "sell" something.
Advertising is advertising, be it print media, radio or television or whatever. People are influenced by what they read, hear, or see. Don't kid yourself that Photobucket doesn't somehow doesn't generate enough advertising revenue to stay afloat.
Something else has to be behind Photobucket's decision to cut loose all us little guys, for it is not so stupid as to believe that everyone will stick around and pay $400 per year when the same thing can be had free elsewhere. For whatever the reason, it already assumes that all us littl guys will leave. Photobucket wants to jettison all us little guys. It's a business decision of some kind.