Amazon and eBay Images Broken By Photobucket's 'Ransom Demand' (bbc.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Thousands of images promoting goods sold on Amazon and other shopping sites have been removed after a photo-sharing service changed its terms. Ebay and Etsy have also been affected, in addition to many forums and blogs. The problem has been caused by Photobucket introducing a charge for allowing images hosted on its platform to be embedded into third-party sites. The company caught many of its members unaware with the change, prompting some to accuse it of holding them to ransom. Denver-based Photobucket is now seeking a $399 annual fee from those who wish to continue using it for "third-party hosting" and is facing a social media backlash as a consequence.

Comments

idiots

[DontBeAMoran]

Why the fuck would you use a third-party service to host your products/auctions images instead of using Amazon or eBay?

Re:idiots

[Harold Halloway]

Because if you sell a lot of items on a number of different platforms it makes more sense to upload the images once and then link to them from the various platforms.

Re:idiots

[Kardos]

But that costs money

Re: idiots

[epyT-R]

No it's not. This is a site for technical people. There's no need for every site online to be 'accessible' to the lowest common denominator. Should ESPN or buzzfeed (eew) cater to us?

Re:idiots

[Dunbal]

If you sell a lot of items you're not a casual user, in which case you should be able to afford or at least look into other solutions for your image problem instead of forcing someone else to pay for your bandwidth. Ahh, but greed.

Re:idiots

[barc0001]

Because back in the day Ebay at least didn't offer photo hosting. My sister has been selling things on Ebay since the 90s and she hosts her images on my server for the simple reason that it's the way she's always done it and it works well. Now on top of that she has an independent site hosted on my server that also sells the same items and reuses the same image links.

I imagine a lot of Photobucket users started off doing it a few images at a time when they first started and now it's a matter of process inertia and a large number of images that would have to be moved. People aren't necessarily idiots for doing it, they do what works simply for them with their limited experience.

Re:idiots

[thegarbz]

Ahh, but greed

Greed isn't the answer. Simplicity is. There are few paid services quite as simple as uploading something to photobucket and posting a link elsewhere.

The moral of the story:

[Anonymous Coward]

"Host your own data! Eschew 'The Cloud'!"

Your daily reminder of the risks of 'Teh Cloud...'

[ToTheStars]

Be careful when choosing to host images via Someone Else's System. If you're not paying them, they've got some other business plan going on, and it may not be to every end user's advantage.

Too much. $10 a month- folks would have paid

[Maxo-Texas]

But $399 a year, someone will just develop a new technique.

However, Amazon should provide free cloud hosting for any image being hosted to one of it's sites.

Can't Blame Them

[Luthair]

Its hard to really blame Photobucket, if the images are embedded everywhere then they have no opportunity to show ads and fund servers. People using them for commercial purposes have no justification for complaints other than lack of notice.

Re:Can't Blame Them

[msauve]

" if the images are embedded everywhere then they have no opportunity to show ads and fund servers"

Sure they do - they could set it so, say, a random 10% of the linked images are displayed as ads instead. A page (or image) reload would then still have a 90% chance of showing the desired image. Win-win, except for the sites on which the ads might appear. They may not like non-remunerative ads appearing on their site, but that provides incentive for them to provide their own image hosting.

Re:Can't Blame Them

[Anonymous Coward]

Or perhaps images uploaded get increased by X/Y pixels which are filled with an ad. Really isn't that hard to accomplish.

Re:Can't Blame Them

[Just Some Guy]

I have no quams about a fee being charged, but proper notice time/method is reuqired so people can change without being in a panic.

People were uploading images:

• to a free service
• ...who hasn't advertised itself as an image host
• ...but has been paying the server and bandwidth bills of people who are hotlinking its content
• ...and whose terms of service say "These Terms and the Privacy Policy can change. Again, please carefully read this document and our other policies. We may announce if any "big" changes are made, but so long as you've used the Site after the change, regardless of any separate notice, you agree to the current posted version of the Terms."

I don't have a dog in this hunt, but I can't see that Photobucket did anything wrong or that they have any moral or ethical obligation to allow people to keep using them in a way they never intended. Do you think for a second that if people had been using Facebook as a CDN that Facebook would hesitate to nip that in the bud? And would you blame them? If people were misusing your service in a way you never advertised, would you feel obligated to support that for "proper notice time"? (Rhetorical question: you wouldn't.)

Re:Can't Blame Them

[sjames]

I'll counter with:

“But the plans were on display”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

Re:Too much. $10 a month- folks would have paid

[Luthair]

Its actually shocking that Amazon allows hosting images offsite.

Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have many issues with someone charging for what has effectively been free hosting. However, the last time I was there Photobucket looked like a giant clusterfuck. 'You need to enable javascript to view the image even though it's already been loaded in the background and we're just not showing it', etc.
If photobucket tries anything too extreme to make money, they're going to be dumped in favor of literally any other service that isn't completely awful.

Re:Your daily reminder of the risks of 'Teh Cloud.

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have any idea what "no free lunch" means, do you?

Somebody, somewhere always has to pay for that "free lunch". The person eating it may not have to pay (be it money, time, effort, whatever), but someone always has to.

Just put an ad in the image

[dfm3]

What's to stop them from adding a logo or ad banner directly onto the image so that, for example, the bottom 1/4 of the embedded image contains "Hosted by Photobucket, and sponsored by..."

If Ebay or Etsy have an issue with that, they can easily prevent embedded images from Photobucket in posts on their site and force their users to utilize another service.

'The Cloud'

[geekprime]

Every time I hear or see someone talk about 'The Cloud', I make certain to remind them (or explain to them) that 'The Cloud' is literally nothing more than someone else's computer.
By putting your stuff (whatever it is) on 'someone else's computer' you are trusting that, they will respect your privacy, not mess with or copy your data, and when they eventually lose interest in keeping your data for you (and they will, someday) that they give you the warning and opportunity to get your data back before they turn off their computer.

Re: 'The Cloud'

[thegarbz]

Unfortunately that other computer has a much easier to use interface than mine. Probably more redundancy than mine. They have a cool website where I can access data from anywhere... unlike mine.

It's not just someone else's computer. It's the computer belonging to someone who is far better at working with computers than I am. /idiot user mode.
Okay so I run Owncloud / Seafile on mine on a zfs zpool with an offsite backup. But I'm not going to pretend that it didn't take me a long time and a lot of learning to get to that point.

My girlfriend on the otherhand just booted up Windows 10 and dragged some files into the folder called Onedrive. Those "other people's computers" sure sound tempting.

Re:Your daily reminder of the risks of 'Teh Cloud.

[tlhIngan]

Be careful when choosing to host images via Someone Else's System. If you're not paying them, they've got some other business plan going on, and it may not be to every end user's advantage.

I believe eBay now self-hosts the images that show in the image side, but allow linking to external images in the listing itself. (So you have to post an image on eBay's system in order for the listing to have an image where people expect it).

And hotlinking of other people's images isn't an uncommon thing. I've seen many websites relink their photos because some idiot on eBay hotlinks the images. So what they do is simply replace the hotlinked image with something else and relink the image in their text with it.

And I've seen images changed from the item to clearly broken versions of the item (with the auction claiming "works!" but the screen is cracked, for example), to missing pieces (for "complete!" items, but now the image is missing a charger or other accessory), to goat porno and worse.