Want your images back? Sure... That'll be $5!

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.

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?

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".

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).

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.

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.

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.

$5 recovery in small claims court maybe? :)

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.

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.

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

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

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?

And a chargeback costs them like $20.