Photobucket Images Temporarily Disabled - June 2017

GTR-Admin

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Mar 22, 2016
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Over the past week, there have been world-wide issues with displaying Photobucket images on "3rd Party Hosting" services / sites. Basically, it seems that Photobucket has changed the rules on sharing your images on other sites - including GT-Rider!

The result is a replacement image where YOUR image should be;
- it does say "temporarily disabled" so hopefully Photobucket intends to stop whatever they are doing?


photobucket-image-errors.jpg


Note: this is not just on GT-Rider - dozens of other forums are reporting the same problems!! Some examples include:

Problems with Photobucket - Web Browsing/Email and Other Internet Applications
Photobucket 3rd party hosting? | Off-Topic Discussion | forum |
Photobucket 3rd party hosting - Yellow Bullet Forums


One GT-Rider has reported that his images work on a Pattaya Forum today, but not on GT-Rider... That is odd, but its still an issue that was initiated specifically by Photobucket - as the "replacement" image clearly states.

It may be rolling out in stages rather than all at once - possibly by countries. GT-Rider.com is hosted in the USA, the Pattaya site is in Quebec.
 
Apr 2, 2008
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www.bmwoverlander.com
Yes, exact copy of my report from GTR works fine on Pattaya Forum.

I even paid for upgrade and no positive changes so far, at least not on this forum.

There could be 2 reasons:

1. As Ben said, perhaps takes some time for PB to resolve in certain parts of the world

or

2. Forum bandwidth issues

Whatever it is, let's hope PB address this issue sooner rather than later but negative past experience with their customer support suggests otherwise.
 

GTR-Admin

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The Photobucket Terms of Service were updated on 20 June 2017:

Types of Accounts, Pricing and Limits:

Visiting: There is no cost to visit the Site or to register as a Member.Free account: Each individual Member gets one free account that provides 2 GB of free storage or space available for your original photo files, or videos under 10min. The free account does not allow any image linking or 3rd*party image hosting.

Plus account: The Plus Account offers several paid options that may give the Paying Member more storage, bandwidth, 3rd*party image hosting, image linking and/or other services as outlined below.

Available Plus Account Plans: Photobucket offers the following Plus Account Plans:
Plus 50 Plan: 52 GB of Storage*for $59.99 / Year.*The Plus 50 Plan does not allow any image linking or 3rd*party image hosting.
Plus 100 Plan: 50 GB*of Storage for $99.99 / Year.*The Plus 100 Plan allows for unlimited image linking but does not allow 3rd*party image hosting.
Plus 500 Plan: 500 GB of Storage and 100 GB of bandwidth for $399.99 / Year.The Plus 500 Plan allows for unlimited image linking and 100 GB of *3rd*party image hosting.
Enterprise Level Plan
: For Members that need more than 500 GB of Storage and/or more than 100 GB of bandwidth, Photobucket offers competitive pricing to meet your needs.

So, according to the new Terms of Service, you will have to pay Photobucket $399 per year to have your images displayed on other websites!!!
 

Peeto

Ol'Timer
Jun 21, 2016
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Yes, exact copy of my report from GTR works fine on Pattaya Forum

There it is a little different than in other forums.
As we had in the past some issues with pictures who are hosted somewhere else.
Some doesn't exist anymore, some change the structure of their links, some make pictures only visible if you login into the accounts.

This made a lot of great travel reports unusable.

With the change to xenforo we change something else. All pictures are hosted outside our forum the software grab them, in the moment they are posted, and change them to attachments hosted on our server.

That's the reason you can still see them at our forum.
 
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GTR-Admin

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We activated that as part of switching to HTTPS on GT-Rider.com last night.

It is an Option called "Image and Link Proxy" - and its primary function is preventing "insecure content" errors on HTTPS (secure) pages.

However, the very next setting is the "Image Cache Lifetime (Days)" and the default is 7 days. Once that expires, any Photobucket links on sites using the Image Proxy option are probably going to start failing too...
 

Peeto

Ol'Timer
Jun 21, 2016
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No image and proxy link is a different thing.

This keeps pictures only in cache.

We keep pictures physically on our server.

There are 2 addons for this.

Convert Image

This convert images at the time they are postet.

Convert Image All

With this you can convert images in old posts as long as they accessible.
 

GTR-Admin

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Ok, thanks for the extra details...

With Photobucket currently blocking image hotlinks, it might not be possible to download and convert any images off their service.
There is the issue of how many gigagbytes of images are linked from GT-Rider - a decade or more of trip report photos.

However, I will check if the server has the required image processing tools, before Smugmug decides to copy Photobucket!
 

GTR-Admin

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The best long-term solution is to implement the helpful suggestion made by Peeto, and convert all the external images to local forum storage.

However, that still requires any Photobucket users to sign on for the Plus 500 plan for a month at a cost of $39.99 - once images are converted, they can downgrade their plan to *Free.

I will have to install additional server software (ImageMagick) to do the image processing, and the 2 Xenforo image conversion modules recommended by Peeto.

The plan is to tackle that over the weekend....
 

George HuaHin

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sounds strange....
seems my linked pictures on PB are still visible here and in another forum

test:
ks50ss_zps727776cf.jpg
 
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GTR-Admin

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Hi Peeto - I have installed the "Convert Image" and the "Convert Image All" add-ons, and the server technician is installing the ImageMagick PECL Extension for me tonight.

Image Dimensions: I'm interested to know how you have configured the "Convert Image" settings;
1 - what pixel sizes have you specified e.g. 1024 x 768 or larger?
2 - what maximum file size have you set?

I will start that rolling as soon as the ImageMagick code is loaded.
 

GTR-Admin

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Mar 22, 2016
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Hi Peeto - I have installed the "Convert Image" and the "Convert Image All" add-ons, and the server technician is installing the ImageMagick PECL Extension for me tonight.

Image Dimensions: I'm interested to know how you have configured the "Convert Image" settings;
1 - what pixel sizes have you specified e.g. 1024 x 768 or larger?
2 - what maximum file size have you set?

I will start that rolling as soon as the ImageMagick code is loaded.
 

Peeto

Ol'Timer
Jun 21, 2016
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For the addon the minimum is 96 px and maximum 5000 px.
Till this size pictures will proceeded.

You have to set also the attachment size. This is set to 1280x1280px to archive the Aspekt ratio. This is the size ImageMagick will resize the picture.
You can set this to any size you think it will fit your forum. At VB we had 800x600 due many had only a small internet connection. Today not necessary anymore. Lot of users ask for this higher resolution because the pictures are better.
And with xenforo is responsible it doesn't matters what kind of hardware you use the pictures are called wit media queries and have always the right size.
And the file size is set to 4096 Kb. Need to be high otherwise it will not be accepted for processing.

This is not the size of the final picture. Only to give ImageMagick a border.

Keep in mind the PHP settings need to accept this size also.

I hope you understand what I wrote. Is not my language and technical explanation is not so easy.
 
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Peeto

Ol'Timer
Jun 21, 2016
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By the way we host about 420k of pictures in our gallery took up a space of 64 GB.

And around 1.2 Million as attachments with another 7.5 GB space.
 

GTR-Admin

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Mar 22, 2016
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Hi Peeto

Thanks for that information and advice, very much appreciated!
- I have around 60Gb of free space at the moment so will have to monitor that closely
 

Peeto

Ol'Timer
Jun 21, 2016
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Pattaya
You told that you use cloudflare.
You can host the attachments there.
In the config of xenforo you can change the place for the data and internal-data directories.
 

GTR-Admin

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Mar 22, 2016
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Image Processing: as per Peeto's recommendation, I installed the "Convert Image All" and started converting external images loading from Photobucket, Smugmug etc into "Attachments" in the forum...

There were over 15,600 posts with image links. This process has been running since Friday morning and by Saturday morning 8,000 posts had been processed, with almost 30Gb of images having been been converted into GT-Rider.

Last night we installed another Xenforo add-on called Nobita Image Optimizer and that is currently running, compressing all images to reduce their overall file sizes.
- after a couple of hours, it had reduced the overall image attachment library size by over 10Gigabytes!

The down side is that it creates a very heavy load on the server!

For that reason, you may find that the GT-Rider site may be very slow at times throughout this weekend as clusters of images are being processed every few minutes.

However, at the end of this initial process, the page load speeds across the entire site will be dramatically improved. Some of the more recent Threads and Posts with large (over 1 Mb) images loaded on www.smugmug.com etc end up with a total page load size of 40 - 50 Mb! The estimate is that these post sizes will be reduced to a more modest 3-4 Mb...

As an example, the many thousands of images that David has posted over the years have been of modest dimensions (pixel) size - but none have been compressed! My guess is that the total file size of his image contributions will be reduced by at least 50%.

As well as all the image processing efforts, significant enhancements to page load speed have been implemented on the server infrastructure, including;
- new database system, caching, compression

From this point onwards, all images posted on GT-Rider in links will be automatically converted to Forum "attachments" and resized and compressed.

The original issue with Photobucket is - as Pensionist suggested - very odd;
- some members are not affected at all, and we've converted thousands of Photobucket images successfully
- other members have many images blocked - but not all of them
 
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