Hahaha - Everyone should pay BigFish .25 cents for using his great write ups. Then he can pay for premium Photobucket account. Tundra brakes and B&M trans cooler. Where do I pay my .50 cents?
You know, it's not about the money. A one year account upgrade costs something like $30. A one month upgrade is $3. It's chicken scratch, really.
Here's my beef with the whole thing:
Photobucket recently overhauled their site, and completely eliminated much of the sites functionality. You can no longer see detailed stats on pictures & albums. There is no longer a "view all" function within albums so you can locate older pictures without having to dig through page after page after page of pictures. The list goes on and on.
ADD TO THAT, they created new upload rules that are engineered to force existing users like myself into paying for upgraded accounts. What changes, you ask?
1. They eliminated a feature that allowed you to upload pictures at a specified resolution. I used to upload everything at 640x480 because at that resolution the pictures took up very little storage space in my account, but were still perfectly sized for forum viewing/posting. Now, EVERY picture is uploaded at full resolution, the user has no choice in the matter. In my case, that's something ridiculous like 4400x3100 pixels (???) because my camera shoots 14MP images. I upload 30 pictures now, and it eats up 10% of my 2GB storage capacity. You can now only choose what resolution will be displayed when pictures are linked on external sites. PB frames this as a "benefit" because it "gives you the ability to post your pictures in whatever resolution you want".
2. They shrunk the capacity of the free accounts by 1/2 a GB.
3. Now that they are forcing users to upload images at full res, every time one of those images is viewed on an external site, it is using multitudes of additional bandwidth because the viewer is remotely accessing a file that is MUCH larger. This makes a user like myself hit the bandwidth limit nearly twice as fast.
So here we are today. I never used to encounter this problem before they changed their site, and I'm not about to let their new policies manipulate me in to paying for something that I've been getting for free for over 1/2 a decade. I used to sing praises for PB, but as far as I'm concerned these days, that site can crash and burn. Good riddance, PB.
If you guys want to put money in their pocket so you can see the pics without interruption, that's up to you. I'm not asking anyone to do that, but I will gladly recognize within the writeups anyone who chooses to "sponsor" them.
/rant.
