What is Photobucket and why does myArmoury.com need a fix?

Many people wishing to share images on the 'net use the popular image hosting site Photobucket to host images that can then be posted in topics on forums like myArmoury.com. They provided this service free of charge, and for a little bit of cash would allow their users a bunch of bandwidth as well. Recently they changed their business model and now want to charge members $400/annually to allow for their photos to be linked and shown on other web sites.

This decision breaks millions of forum topics all over the Internet, eBay auctions, and other pages that have had images from Photobucket on them, showing this image instead of the one intended:

[ Linked Image ]

You can read more about the problem here

This was particularly upsetting to me given that I own this site and suddenly in one fell swoop hundreds of topics here were suddenly shown with broken images! We've had some great things posted here so I had to do something.


Can't something be done to fix this?

With a bit of programming magic I came up with a solution that now correctly displays the Photobucket hosted images in our topics!

Check out this topic here as an example

That topic contains a lot of images hosted on Photobucket that would show up as broken until my newly implemented fix.


So what?

Topics are hard to read when they're full of broken images. A lot of our really great discussions here are image-intensive and really rely on those images to tell the whole story. Without them, a significant percentage of our content's value is diminished.

I think myArmoury.com might be the only forum to have even tried to tackle this problem at this time. I believe I'd bet I'm the first to come up with a solution. I won't reveal how I made this fix but will say that my solution is pretty creative if I say so myself.

This fix is still being tested so there are bound to be some issues with it.


Can I see some examples?

All the photos below are hosted on Photobucket. Without the fix, they would all show up as broken images. They're displaying correctly now (assuming that the people don't delete them from their Photobucket accounts, of course!)

$400 annually !?! That is highway robbery. You could pay for actual site hosting and upload pictures for the purpose of linking so much cheaper (maybe even free depending on the WordPress.com terms of use).

You said you won't share how you worked around this problem so I won't actually ask that, but I will say that it obviously took some research and hard work. Adding a database trigger to update the links is the obvious part, but figuring out what the link needs to be is still eluding me. I don't really have a need to know how this was done, but I may waste part of the day trying to figure it out anyway.

Thanks for taking the time to figure this out. You are right that many topics on this site lose a lot of value without working images.

-- Greyson

As always Nathan your efforts are much appreciated.

Applause, sir! Uproarious applause!

I moved to Imgur as soon as Photobucket started spamming me with honest-to-gods extortion emails some weeks ago ("Nice photos you've shared, be a real shame if anything happened to them," and embarrassingly close to those actual words) but of course that doesn't help all the old threads on all the forums I've posted images in and can't edit anymore...

I'm fairly impressed and quite curious how you did that. But if you don't wanna spill, eh, fair I guess. :)

Nathan,

Wonderful! Frankly, I was getting a bit depressed over this situation as I believed the site had suffered a serious wound. Now I believe in "miracles" and suspect there might even be a "higher authority" .....

A well earned Thank You!

Regards.
Dan

I checked my latest review and all pictures are there it seems. I don't know how you did it, but thank you. :)

Nathan,

My hat is off to you for finding a work around for this without throwing computers out the window. I have spent a total of maybe 3 hours looking into this today and I can feel my blood pressure rising. I created a junk photobucket account and uploaded a picture. I could see my picture and link to it from an external site for about 20 minutes; after that I couldn't even view my own picture when logged into photobucket. From within their own site, I got the "update your account to allow 3rd party hosting" message! They seem to not understand the concept of "3rd party" (or the difference between update and upgrade).

You, sir, have my respect for being able to tolerate their festering, ad-filled excuse for a site long enough to solve this problem.

-- Greyson

Thank you for working to resolve this.

Hi Everybody-

I did some statistical analysis of the Photobucket images that have been posted on our forum:

Number of PB images posted: 62,233
Distinct number of PB images posted: 56,481

Since the fix we have already served up 12,228 distinct images at this time. These images have been cached locally in case PB changes their technology, moves the images, or goes out of business. This number will just keep growing as posts are accessed.

Well done, and thank you, Nathan!

Since the fix we have saved 21,549 distinct images from Photobucket's prison.

These images have been cached locally in case PB changes their technology, moves the images, or goes out of business. This number will just keep growing as posts are accessed.

Since the fix we have saved 39,431 distinct images from Photobucket's prison.

These images have been cached locally in case PB changes their technology, moves the images, or goes out of business. This number will just keep growing as posts are accessed.

This is a whole lot of content we saved from the ashes.

I noticed the pics were live again and naively thought Photobucket had second thoughts about their rather unfriendly conduct...but could not find anything to corroborate that hypothesis online - I can see why now :)
Well played Nathan - would have been a shame to loose all that content!
I'll stick with Imgur from now on...
J

BTW: My previous post assumed a MySQL database, as that is the most likely. For Microsoft SQL Server, change
SELECT concat("firefox http://myArmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=",topicid," &")
to SELECT "firefox http://myArmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t="+topicid+" &"

For Oracle, it would be:
SELECT "firefox http://myArmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t="||topicid||" &"

Hey Greyson, I don't want to clutter this topic with technical stuff other than to say this: I know how to make a script that queries the pages, but there's a lot of other complications such as topic pagination (digging down into multi-page topics), passing session variables/cookies, server load, and some other database-specific stuff I don't want to mention here. At this point, it's moot because...

~~~~~~~~

Since the fix we have saved 51,228 distinct images from Photobucket's prison.

These images have been cached locally in case PB changes their technology, moves the images, or goes out of business. This number will just keep growing as posts are accessed.

We've saved 90% of the 56,481 hosted images.