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.

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.

Apparently using Vercel to host a personal blog might not be the best idea. I'm nearly reaching the limit of Edge Requests in just 2 hours after the post.

I had always thought that fixing outages was one of the least appealing parts of software engineering, but so many SWE blogs seem to have built blogs in ways where downtime is inevitable.

Unless there is an extremely good reason not to use one, a static site generator works perfectly well. Next, there are many 3p services which will display that site for free. GitHub pages, AWS free tier, I’m sure there are plenty of other ones.

Importantly, and relevant to this article, the files live on your computer. You can mirror them in any number of repos if you want, but it is not possible for any 3p service to hold them hostage.

I am thoroughly convinced that this is the right way that I’d even go so far as to say it is a best practice for roll-your-own blogs, and any sort of issue like the article describes is a direct result of not following that best practice.

Look through old email to figure out what email address they had.

Attempt to log in, no memory of password. Get reset link sent to my ancient Hotmail.

Hotmail doesn't recognize this device because I haven't logged in in a decade. Send an email to my hotmailspam@my-domain.com that I apparently set up at some point to confirm my identity. Have to enter multiple confirmation codes.

Log into Hotmail, click link to reset Photobucket password.

Create a new password, put it on my vault.

"Failed to reset password Firebase: Error (auth/the-service-is-currently-unavailable.)."

Perfect. No notes.

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.

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...

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".

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?

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.

IMO the main damaged party here is everyone who comes to old forum threads and finds lots of inaccessible images (or images watermarked to the point of being unusable). But then again it was never reasonable to expect image hosts to provide a free service forever.

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 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?

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).

I don't even have an account with photobucket but I fully feel the pain of this user and I got outraged just by reading this.

I think this kind of SaaS business is going to go the way of the Dodo very soon.

Some of the emails specifically mention that there’s 35 photos, so at least mine’s not empty.

I’d assume that at some point the emails must cost more than $5?

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

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.

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.

Selfhost with Unraid and Immich.

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

$5 recovery in small claims court maybe? :)

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.

Around 2017 they started charging, and I honestly hadn't used it in almost 10 years. But I managed to download all my photos - I can't remember what the trick was, but it was ridiculously easy to get around their racketeering nonsense back then. Then they incessantly started mailing about photos being deleted.

It is a textbook example of scumbag behavior. Wouldn't surprise me if they wholesale sold photos to AI companies, while making the same photos unavailable even to paying customers.

What value you put on memories is a good question.

(The companies exist to help corporations recover million dollar risks and price their time and equipment to match that market, not boomer memory lane)

You shared them.

Not "You transfer all copies to us, and erase your backups". The "protection" part is making sure the whole world doesn't see the copies you gave them. This "problem" is so old, it should be taught in pre-k by now. Sharing != backup. Friendly reminder to backup your decades old Gmail account before something like this happens too.

And a chargeback costs them like $20.

But as seen by the recent rejection of Stop Killing Games by the EU Commission, society has apparently decided that more money means you should have more say. So the corporations (who would absolutely go to the extremes in terms of ensuring that they don't plateau and instead make more money than last quarter) become the defacto government.

Corporations are not people in and of themselves. They are groups of people at best (and with the way generative AI is going, that's not even guaranteed long-term). There are certain benefits to counting corporations as people for certain parts of contract law, but there is zero benefit to conferring free speech rights on the actual corporations themselves.

Meanwhile, the current US administration is all about finding whatever grift they can attach to and enrich themselves at the cost of founding values.

The biggest thing that pushes me towards idealistic communism is the actions taken by Western society. Maybe that's where we need to use the blockchain and related technologies, to enact the principles of communism without having the state be a proxy for the people. A documented, nearly unfalsifiable share of the means of production means that they'd have to resort to the $5 wrench to be evil in that context, instead of the massive corruption that historic implementations of communism have suffered while the frogs slowly boil. At least it might be a start, I don't know. I just know I see the path the world is taking, and right now the entire Western world is devolving into a weird techno-fascism that locks out any free thought