slOT: Photobucket Morass

[cubsfan-budman]

are there other good FREE options?

[thecatspajamas]

Anyone had any luck with Photobucket since the forced switchover to the "new" version of the site? I haven't been able to upload photos through the site, their "desktop" app doesn't work for me (when trying to upload, just has a "busy" circle spinning at the top and never shows me any options for where to upload to), and now the ftp "back door" that I was using to get photos uploaded for use on eBay isn't working.

If anyone knows any "tricks," I'd be glad to hear them. PB customer service is useless. I e-mailed them weeks ago about the problem. Heard nothing for 2 weeks so I e-mailed them again. Got a canned response that their engineers had found the problem and were working on a solution. Then a week or so later get another canned e-mail from them saying:

"Hello,
We haven't heard back from you in a few days so we're checking in with you! We're hoping this means our suggestions have worked, or you've answered your question yourself. If this is the case, well done! If your question is still unanswered, don't worry! You can reply back to this email and re-open the ticket, or if its been a while, it will open a new ticket."

I could go on with my griping, but the bottom line is I'm not expecting any real help from PB.

Failing that, anyone have any suggestions for other photo hosting solutions? I'm fine with paying for a service, so long as it's stable, isn't going anywhere, and has a simple interface with predictable urls for linking photos for use in eBay listings. I would dump PB altogether, but at this point I have thousands of eBay listings that use photos linked from PB, and I shudder at the thought of trying to update all those to a new source. So I'm looking at leaving the PB-linked listings as-is and just going with a new option from here forward, possibly revising and the old listings over time.

[sbfinley]

Originally Posted by cubsfan-budman

are there other good FREE options?

collectorfocus.com

[thecatspajamas]

Figured out late last night what was wrong with the ftp upload for PB: apparently you can't have the PB site open in a browser AND upload through ftp in Windows Explorer at the same time. If you close the browser window and just work through ftp and it works fine.

Just in case anyone is having similar problems and wants to try the ftp interface, you get to it by opening Windows Explorer and in the address line type ftp://username: password@ftp.photobucket.com (no spaces) where username and password are the ones you use for your PB account. I'm not sure if this works with the Free accounts. Supposedly the ftp method was going away with the new site. It's still there though, they just don't tell you how to get to it anymore.

So anyway, I'm still limping along, but would be glad to hear of any simple, relatively cheap options for hosting photos where I can just dump the images and then link to them in some predictable way (i.e. no filename scrambling) for eBay listings, Net54 posts, etc. I don't need fancy photo album displays and would actually prefer it NOT to look like facebook, which is where PB seems to be headed. The more utilitarian the better, I say