Want your images back? That'll be $5

I have received the email that my photobucket account is going to be deleted, so I've logged in after who knows how many years and got offered the same thing, to subscribe. Instead I've went to close the account and in the process (or somewhere else, don't remember exactly) there was an option to first download all the data which I've used and got the images back (there were just a few as I haven't used the service really), then I've closed the account. There was no need to subscribe.

Why are we complaining about this as a corporate greed thing? (I do agree that it's bad that there were no images preserved and that component of the post is justifiable)

Obviously Photobucket completely failed to properly monetize, and was sold to Fox and then offloaded to some no-name startup called Ontela (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photobucket). The service could have been shutdown completely and the harddrives fed into the shredder. Instead some former PE vulture did the math and figured out that preservation might make some money. You _can_ access old Photobucket images (when it works) that would otherwise get a median of 0 hits a month, while the rest of the internet succumbs to linkrot. Seems like a win-win for everyone involved.

Considering they explicitly said they had some photos of yours ("You shared them. We protected them."), this seems like chargeback territory.

If Google Photos gave me my photos in one go, exactly as they are in the app, I'd gladly pay $5.

As it stands, they offer "Takeout" for free. This process gives you hundreds of zip files with the photos distributed into deep subfolders by date. That would be forgivable if it weren't for the fact that they revert all their processing and deduping, leaving you with 20 copies of the same file scattered in random places. To make matters worse, if you try to download more than two zips at a time, it throws an error and forces you to start a new Takeout request. You then have to wait 24 hours for an email telling you that you can try downloading the zips all over again.

I just assume the project manager responsible is a Dark Triad personality whose sole goal in life is preventing people from ever leaving Google Photos.

My current strategy is to chisel it down by using the Google Photos search function to show 100 files as a time, which I download as a zip, then delete those 100 while they're still selected. That way they are somewhat organized and still deduped, unlike the mess that Takeout gives me.

If ever there was a use-case for chargebacks, this is it. Threaten their support to refund or you will file a chargeback, and then file one if they refuse.

Shout out to Flickr! No matter how many gigabytes you had uploaded, you can still access them. You just can’t upload more without a Flickr Pro plan.

At least you were able to restore them. 25 years ago I was using the service and went a while without logging in. They deleted some of my favorite photos. They were photos I had taken with a cheap $20 digital camera (pushing it to it's limits). I hadn't backed my photo's up anywhere else so they were just lost.

Edit: I see now that there were actually no photos to restore. A second question I wondered is if I could get at those long lost photos (I'm sure they were physically deleted back in the day).

I think the lesson here is that you should always save (backup) your data on storage (services) and never on functional services. And this certainly includes Google, Apple and Microsoft Photos.

What's the best alternative? Flickr?

I don't want to self-host my photos, too much management.

I don't want to use Apple or Google or MS Clouds for various reasons.

I do want to support a pure-play, independent-ish, profitable, consumer friendly platform. To upload hires shots and have them easy to tag/share/access among those to whom they may be of interest.

I expect to pay, but not through the nose. Reliability matters. I would want the company to be around in 20 years and still reasonably priced/useful. Suggestions?

Given this is a largely technical crowd, I feel it my duty to share just how good (and free/open) Immich is.

If you’re like me and don’t want to be an “admin for life” then it’s still for you.

What has worked for me for over a decade is to keep the source of my photos in a boring old folder (backed up to my synology and Dropbox). And then layer photo viewing and sharing apps on top.

The day I’m sick of Immich and there’s a better alternative, I switch.

I’ve written about how it works as I’ve gone along. Recommend reading and putting your own twist on it.

https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-pho...

https://medium.com/vantage/understanding-my-need-for-an-auto...

This seems besides unethical also illegal. Never assume companies have good legal counsel, particularly in the LLMs era. There are consumer protection laws and in the US they are by state. Sometimes all it takes is completing a 5 min form in the state AG’s website. Sure, $5 is not a lot of money, but screw them.

Regardless of whether this is legal or not, I think this move is subjectively scummy. I know that profit maximisation means going against common ideas of what is "a nice thing to do", but there's a line that's been crossed here between "the business has to support itself" and "trying to exploit and milk our customers".

Honestly, if storage costs were an issue, I would have preferred they delete it with notification than sell hope at a ransom.

Wonder if there any startups that have grown without resorting to these low blow tactics - just the idealised free market of "we provide such a good service that you're willing to pay us our fair price".

I have a legacy email account with a "used to be popular" ISP

It's free, I've been using it for ~25 years, you know the drill.

However, I lost access to it when I bought a new phone, and everything didn't transfer over. I couldn't reset the password without buying the 'premium' service, it was only $10 or $15, I was able to cancel after (so I wasn't re-charged next year or month).

Attachments are suffering, as the saying goes. Presuming the author used Photobucket in the early aughts and 26-ish years later he's curious about any photos?

I don't necessarily mean this to be dismissive, but it'll come off like that and it is what it is: Don't go through life getting this mad at something so inconsequential (five dollars). The typical response is "its the principal", but they're not beholden to your principals, and getting worked up because someone else compromised your principals is not healthy. Its just other people doing things. Neither money nor principals will save you from the downstream effects this attitude will have on your body and soul.

Maybe I'm some kind of capitalist pig, because I can't find much to be mad about here. To summarize:

1. Customer took the initiative to check out a long-dormant free photo hosting account

2. Found that it required payment with a message implying strongly that the count of photos in the account was >0

3. Customer didn't like the idea of a subscription of any kind, but eventually figured out that you can just download your crap and cancel

4. Customer found that the account was apparently unused and empty

5. Customer cared a lot about his $5 but apparently only after 2 days had past since this incident

Of all this, only #2 is annoying -- it would be best if they didn't use the call-to-action implying you have photos on the account when the count of photos is zero. I can see though how that wasn't built -- the question asked in a meeting about this upsell feature would have been, 'who are all these people who have Photobucket accounts with zero photos, who come back after a decade to log back into them?'

Most sites from the 2005 or 1999 eras of VC money funded "Free" services simply shut down and deleted everything, many without much warning. For the 99% of people who are logging into an old photobucket account in 2026, sure, nobody needs to actually start a recurring subscription, but if you expect that they should store your stuff for 20 years and should never ask for a cent is the same attitude I had as a teen Napster user. Clearly the amount of value the customer is getting is "greater than zero" so about $0.25 a year for long-term archiving of photos is just fine.

This is gross, it could be a onetime fee.

It's hard to remember with all the ownership changes, but the Photobucket era was really a different time, of "it's your data, you're in charge, and we give you maximal control of it" - people would upload there to post elsewhere, and I recall they ran ads to monetize. But this era had the ethic that uploading was expensive, and you'd maybe want to do it once and have control of your stuff after that.

Now we have photo hosting services that barely work on the web (iCloud), or work only within a walled garden (Instagram), and I do miss the "it's your stuff, we're just a website" kind of attitude from the mid-2000s.

5 dollars for having that story to tell, not bad

Oh man.. you made my day.. I especially loved the tiki spongebob memes.. I still have Jacques Cousteau's voice going thru my head "One Hour Later"......

That's just fucking greedy. I've been working on a SaaS and it's honestly hard sometimes to not stoop to those greedy levels because the money is really there.

Our policy is a subscription grants you write access to your account, but read access will always be there even after you subscription expires. We are still working on policies around long term data retention though.

That's pretty deceptive conduct on Photobucket's part.

$5 recovery in small claims court maybe? :)

Wow, shocker, a company will not indefinitely store your data for free.

Why store "childhood memories" on an online service though? Those websites get hacked all the time, you're lucky if your privates pictures don't endup in the wrong hands...

> Want your images back? Sure... That'll be $5!

That kind of long con is (and has always been) part of the basic business model of most of the "free" service providers on the internet.

First one is free, played on a decade time scale, works fine in a world where capital is quasi-free.

The hyperscalers play it a little more subtly, but the principle is the same.

There’s a emphasis and repetition of sound bites and empty words in our culture, as though they mean something clear and understandable though it’s really a sound bite and a phrase to ease your discomfort and help you feel better about yourself: corporate greed is one of those words.

There is no such thing as a corporation being conscious or taking a will of its own and choosing to be greedy. It’s just a symbol to represent humans being greedy. Let’s call it what it is: it’s human leaders and bourgeois people being greedy. I don’t find it honest when we continue to use inaccurate phrases in this deceptive manner since we don’t want to look at the situation for what it really is. Or assume our responsibility in the matter.

We’ve allowed this greed by tolerating it, interacting with the humans (or not) and pretending the reality isn’t what it is. What is complaining and stopping there asking about it? Surely we can do more than just make an internet article about it and think it will change.

"You want fries with thaat?"

Not to excuse their behavior, but Photobucket is dead. They are trying to wring the last drops of money out of it. You should not use dead commercial products.

storing data over years takes money, so charging for it I can understand

but charging and knowing you don't have any data for this user is a big NO NO

"As I was writing and reliving this beautiful experience, I noticed a little footnote on the payments page

It's not a footnote or smallprint, it's written prominently right above the button so people are well aware of it...

How would they respond to a GDPR request?

Just like with almost everything Photobucket was sold or raised money from investors throughout the years repeatedly.

That money they want back!

From somewhere, any way, pimping the EBITDA and ARR numbers to the expected one for the 5-7 years resale cycle or such. ARR needs subscription, and if you have user lock in - well, otherwise you wouldn't buy some trivial service like this wouldn't you? You counted on the lock-in, that is central to you 'business model', or more like exploitation - then try cash it. Now! You can alienate people down the line? Let that be the problem of the next owner of the product, you will cash out soon anyway. And next PE look at the price/ARR ratio mostly, anyway, it will be a fine add-on to some other PE target at least, if the ARR ratio is fine.

PE is shitting where it eats.... and others eat too ... ruining it for everyone. Don't care. Why don't they buy oil or beef farms or whatever, why they need to ruin the internet too?

So, like and a kind reminder they have legal obligation to give all the personal data they have about you under Europeans laws, and that's it?

Just do a GDPR request and get all the data they have on you for free. I’m pretty sure they would have to give you your photos as part of that.

Photobucket sent me multiple e-mails during a long time period to alert me about this change. So the author quite willfully ignored those.

Wow this is a next level scam lol

Chargeback time. They claimed to have your photos, then fucking lied about it.

And a chargeback costs them like $20.

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Every time I see one of these I make a note that it's a successful strategy to make money, so I might apply it in a future project.

You have to view all cloud storage - all free cloud storage anyway - as ephemeral. If you want your childhood pictures to survive, store them someplace you have control over.