Something I never expected to have to work out what I feel about...

[andrewducker]

Photobucket has turned all of the photos on my wedding post into "Please update your account to share these photos" images, unless I pay them hundreds of dollars.

I have literally no idea how idea how to feel about this.

(Other than grim amusement)

Aaah, the modern world...

Comments

[killerweasel]

Was your account one of the free ones?

I have been trying for almost 2 weeks to get photobucket to tell me if I will be able to use html to post my pictures on dreamwidth and livejournal with my $40 a year paid account but all of my emails have gone unanswered.

[andrewducker]

Let me know if you hear anything!

[killerweasel]

After 6 emails, this is what I got-
As a Plus subscriber in good standing as of June 1, 2017, you will continue to have all the privileges you have enjoyed including 3rd Party Hosting until December 31, 2018, as long as your account remains current.

So.... I am assuming that none of the 12 years worth of images I have on LJ and imported over to here will show up any longer once 2019 rolls around, though I am not sure if it will still show up if I don't renew my $40 a year account I currently have.

I am also highly irritated there isn't an option to download an entire folder of pictures as a group. You literally have to save each picture individually. I have 17000 pictures.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, that's fucked.

I hope someone writes a scraper.

[killerweasel]

Actually, I did come across this through the hundreds of comments on photobucket's twitter page-

https://bitbucket.org/michelvh/photobucketscraper

I wouldn't have any idea how to use that, but I bet people who can code will.

[marahmarie]

I'm totally curious about this, as I expect it to happen to me sooner or later which will affect one or both of my blogs, so a few questions for you if you don't mind...

1) If you log in, are your pictures still visible as "your pictures"? Or do you still see the ransom badge in place of every one of them?

2) Have you downloaded your library/libraries yet so at least you have the local copies? Or do you still have the originals, by chance?

3) If you had not downloaded them before the badges appeared, will PB still let you do so now? (This question is more my simple curiosity than anything else, as I've already downloaded my libraries, well ahead of possibly being ransomed as well).

If you have no copies on your side and want them, there is a way to get them without even logging in (just discovered it while traversing your wedding pics, or failing to *ahem*) but it is slow and awful:

1) right-click on the ransom badge in your post
2) right-click on the ransom badge on the PB page you're brought to
3) there's your actual picture
4) *bonus land* once you follow the above steps to download a pic or image, hit your browser's back button**. The picture itself (not the ransom badge) will now load as it should on PB's page and on the page the picture was originally added to, like your wedding day blog post. *all hail MM finder of weird bugs...bows*

Apologies if you already knew all (or any of) that, but it still it might be good to toss out there for others looking for any odd retrieval tips.

** done on Fx latest on Win10; ymmv and PB might find and disable this behavior at any time

[andrewducker]

All good questions.

Will give it all a go at the weekend!

[marahmarie]

I'm actually bookmarking my above comment to post about this on my own blog eventually, as that was really kind of a neat find. Thanks, Andrew! Without this post I would not have figured that out. :)

Update: Photobucket's write-protecting ransomed images

[marahmarie]

The steps I gave you above are more or less good to go, with just two changes so far (all detailed in the post I eventually whipped up on this):

1) my steps won't work, as far as I can tell, using URLS that contain the word "album". Conversely, my steps will work with URLs that contain the word "gallery". I'm thinking the fact that my steps work at all is a bug (more precisely, an "oversight" on PB's part); I just hope they don't disable access to the gallery-worded URLs anytime soon.

2) the ransomed images can be viewed, if you manage to access them in the way I've outlined, in the browser only. Downloading them results in an unreadable file (at least in Windows 10; your mileage may vary in other OSes, but I doubt it) and uploading them to another service results in the same thing - an unreadable file. For expediency's sake I call this PB "write-protecting" the images in the update to my post and in the comment title above. But I don't know what it is. There may be a way to strip out whatever protection PB's using, but that's a bit beyond my can even right now, so I'll have to poke at that (if I ever do) some other time.