Photo Bucket

[sssstew]

nooooooooooooo

[The_Hawk]

We really need a bot to look at all the posts with Photobucket links, use the tool to get the pic, then push the pic to a new host, then update the links in all posts.

I'm looking into something like that.

What pricks photobucket are !!!

Yep.

nooooooooooooo

Yep.

[The_Hawk]

Update! A fix to the Photobucket problem was found and I've spent the last little while implementing it and waiting for it to successfully scan the last 12 years worth of posts.

220,000 external image links have been scanned and 140,000 images have been imported and saved locally so this won't be a problem again. 12GB of new images now sit nicely within VWWatercooleds' servers. Any new images that get posted will automatically be copied in so this sort of issue won't effect us again.

For those interested there are some stats!

Of external links:
50% were hosted with Photobucket (hence the huge problem it was for the community).
- 86% of Photobucket images were recovered.
- 14% are lost to the internet

14% were hosted with imageshack
- Only 11% were recovered
- 89% and dead and gone

4% were hosted with Flickr
- 96% of these images survived!
- Only 4% are dead which is pretty amazing.

The remaining 32% are from lots of different places including personal hosting through TPG/iinet/Telstra etc, other forums, manufacturers websites... lots of places.
- This is the worst pile with almost 40,000 dead links, or 53% of all images from other sources now dead.

Unsurprisingly, the hit rate was really low when we were back in 2005 and increases to a 96% of all links working in 2017.

[Sunny43.5]

Well done amazing job you have done for the members and fairly good results on the recovery side , I know when I first started posting Photos Photo Bucket was the one suggested on the forum .

[jets]

I know when I first started posting Photos Photo Bucket was the one suggested on the forum .

I too received an email from Photo Bucket asking for money to upgrade. So who do we use now?

[Water Boy]

Well done Hawk.

THanks Aaron for saving us.

Can you post a how to or suggest how we should post images now?

[The_Hawk]

Can you post a how to or suggest how we should post images now?

I'm working on that and trying to find something I like and which is easy to use. Something that is, sadly, a little harder than you would think. The short answer is that it doesn't matter where you post an image, anything posted today is automatically sucked into the forum and the links updated behind the scenes.

As for a new site to host your images, you may have noticed that I've quietly put some links into the header leading to the "Image Uploader" and "Image Gallery". This is the current attempt at an in house image hosting system (and there have been a few). Feel free to use this to upload your photos with one small caveat; That particular system is going to be replaced at some point in time*. (Note that all images that are posted will be automatically sucked into the forums from there too so no images should ever be lost).

In the end I want a system that is easy to use and preferably one that integrates directly into the forums. I'm working on either modifying somthing off the shelf or getting a coder in to custom write something for me. Until this, this little tool should work well enough.

[Water Boy]

Cheers Hawk.

[guile]

awesome work Hawk and well done, its pretty amazing to get such a success rate...

a personal thanks from me too as my photos were luckily in the batch of photos that survived, cheers...

i'm actually due an update and wondering what to use now, i was going to use flickr if you'd recommend it...

[DV52]

I'm working on that and trying to find something I like and which is easy to use. Something that is, sadly, a little harder than you would think. The short answer is that it doesn't matter where you post an image, anything posted today is automatically sucked into the forum and the links updated behind the scenes.

As for a new site to host your images, you may have noticed that I've quietly put some links into the header leading to the "Image Uploader" and "Image Gallery". This is the current attempt at an in house image hosting system (and there have been a few). Feel free to use this to upload your photos with one small caveat; That particular system is going to be replaced at some point in time*. (Note that all images that are posted will be automatically sucked into the forums from there too so no images should ever be lost).

In the end I want a system that is easy to use and preferably one that integrates directly into the forums. I'm working on either modifying somthing off the shelf or getting a coder in to custom write something for me. Until this, this little tool should work well enough.

Hawk: First, allow me to add my appreciation for your efforts to those already expressed here - I wish I had your cleaver nous for programming, but alas I'm a Luddite where anything but assembler language is needed!!

Unfortunately, I come (again) asking more questions - I'm really am not stalking you in this venture.

I was able to load an image from my laptop, but I was not able to use the "remote" facility. I thought that I would replicate my previous effort (i.e. transferring a .jpg file from Imgur). This time around, I got no error messages. However, the image loader just reported nothing when I tried and no files were loaded. Here's the URL if you could try for me -please

http://i.imgur.com/me7x6p3.jpg

What am I missing? If I'm making an obvious error, please explain my error in as complex a way as possible - so I don't feel so stupid

And I've done it again - I've forgotten that there is no way of deleting a picture once you leave the Image Loader. Just as a suggestion, is it possible for the forum member who posted the picture to delete it when in the gallery - if the member is logged-in?

Don