This is in PBs FAQ section: CAN I DOWNLOAD MY PICTURES BACK TO MY PHONE OR COMPUTER? Yes, Select your photo, and click the Download Icon. (Note, You can only download one photo at time) _______________________________________________________________________ I tried it with three photos. They were sent back to "My Pictures" on my computer. I checked my editing program, Picasa, and here is what I received and I see no problem with getting 4x6 or 5x7 prints with these...
Hello, Having taken a ton of photos over the years, there is nothing better than to save them to look at, on some rainy day or a holiday weekend when driving around is not in the plan for the day. But, I have learned that private storage is the easiest and safest in any kind of emergency. Why pay anyone to store your own photos. Why store a photo with a watermark on it anyway? It is there for a purpose. Trademark, ownership, not wanting it in circulation…what ever the reason. I am now on a 3tb portable, small hard drive for ALL of our family files and photos. Included is a folder for drag racing films and photos. In another file are hot rod photos taken over the years. They are under one major folder for ease of access. In an emergency, the exit bag has the 3tb back up external hard drive and a back up copy. (emphasized by my son) Both 3tb external hard drives can be stored in any small desk drawer or under a desk in a designated area. No need for PHOTOBUCKET, GOOGLE PHOTOS, PICASA, SMUG MUG, FLICKR or any other service that charges for storing your stuff. WHY? That is your choice. The latest episode was almost having to use the “go bag” with the two external portable hard drives already to go inside, plus a change of clothes and some dog food. Can’t forget the little guy. A big fire was getting close and we were all ready for a quick exit, if it was coming to that strategy. Luckily, it got put out, smelled for days and everything was safe. Jnaki We are a little fanatic, but we don’t store photos we did not take, currently, or over the long family history. Why? They are not ours in the first place and as little or a lot, they take up space, (depending on how you save your internet photos) it just does not feel right. They are someone else’s products. We have one last 4tb small external hard drive in a small safe deposit box that we update every month. That is a size that will probably never get filled up. Photos, family files or any scanned documents… a secure back up unless there is a huge local bank robbery, or two. By the way, is your current computer or laptop running a little slow? Try cleaning out your files with all of those unwanted/unused downloaded photos to an external hard drive for a little more speed and functionality. You don’t have to support all of the space taken unless you are ready to use any photo taken that was put in storage. Be a minimalist and your computer/laptop will thank you. Phones, tablets, 2 in 1 laptop/tablets, are all in the same group. Over load those and functionality slows down.
I downloaded all my pictures I had on PB. The majority of them have had pixels removed so they ended up looking flattened or elongated. They said their site was not compatable with Windows picture viewer. So now I'm faced with trying to open each photo with a different viewer and trying to save them. Just unforgivable what those aholes did to so many picture memories. I sincerely hope they crash and burn. I save everything on an external hard drive these days.
I went back to my albums and gave this a shot, I logged in and tried downloading one image and it didn't work for me, just insisted that I rejoin for 4.99 per month. HRP
You probably have to pay the money before you can download your pictures, eh? anyways....if you had a bunch of old photo albums of family pictures from the old days, and you met a guy on the street who said he'd store them for you and let you see them any time you want, would you give him your precious photos? By giving them to photobucket, that's what you did.
I lost a lot of photo's but fortunately I had many of them on my PC and they are also backed up on the cloud (0r a least that's were my daughter says she put them when my computer crashed). HRP
I'm sorry to hear that. I just found that the photos did indeed go to "My Pictures" but all that was there was just a narrow line. It's in my editing program, Picasa, that I'm able to view the complete image. I'm no computer expert and everything I've learned I stumbled across. My pics are very important to me so I don't dare trust the images to online functions alone. If I'm old fashion I can live with that.
As much as a hate the Photobucket logo on photos if you use their service they write the rules. I have started to "water mark" my photos I post on the H.A.M.B. because my mom found a bunch of them had been lifted and posted on FaceBook as other peoples work. I am not a professional photographer but have some take credit for my work (or others) is B.S. However I never block the subject matter.
Well said Jim. When the PB shit started to hit the fan I thought to myself, why would anyone ever save their pics there, it is clearly an unsustainable business model. Only clueless people I guess. A combination of lazy people and PB together ruined a lot of good well illustrated build threads here on the HAMB.
You're being totally unfair. Many of those threads were started when the HAMB didn't have photo storage. PB was launched on the 'Freemium' business model, once described as the “business model of the Internet”. Users got X space free, and anything more required a subscription. There were at least 10 online backup sites with the same model. Most of them are still around, although most have de-emphasized the free tier. PB did not manage their business well and failed to convert enough users to paid subscriptions. Subsequent decisions like the mandatory watermark and the defocusing of images on all but paid accounts eroded their user base (and people's confidence) even further. I have no idea why anyone would give them money now, except to have access to their photos long enough to remove them.
When I was a beginner, my internet provider gave me space on their site for storage. Does anyone know if this is still practiced? This may be an option for those with just phones for accessing internet. Like others have stated I never leave my precious snaps to someone else's whims. All my pictures are stored on portable hard drives. Occasionally I transfer to new drives because they have been known to crash. Apparently the write magnets get weak over time. I wish I would have used CDs from the start, but would take many days to transfer to discs now.
I have over 200 gigabytes of photos right now, that's a whole lot of CDs! and even a lot of DVDs. And they can go bad over time, too. Your ISP may give you some free storage, or they may not. But they are known to go away suddenly, too. I think we went through 3 or 4 different ones, because they got bought out/merged, before we got to the one we're with now. I don't trust them either.
That's not what "suddenly" means Anything can happen, and how much you want to prepare for it, might depend on how valuable the stuff is to you.
I whish Photobucket would get bought up by (or merge with) one of the other tech giants like Intagram , Facebook, or Amazon and they would grandfather in all the old images in or make it a condition of the sale they have too take off the watermark. The watermark isn't so bad but did they have to make it burly to.
"...you can read and write to an SSD all day long and the data storage integrity will be maintained for well over 200 years. In other words, the data storage life of an SSD can outlive you!" "An SSD does not have a mechanical arm to read and write data, it instead relies on an embedded processor (or “brain”) called a controller to perform operations related to reading and writing data. The controller is a very important factor in determining the SSD read write speed. Decisions it makes related to how to store, retrieve, cache and clean up data can determine the overall SSD speed." Hello, The move to solid state hard drives took a while, but today's consumer has the options to go get the most secure without thinking about changing over in a few years or being outdated. We all grew up using various computer hard drives with spinning discs and had them take a flyer anytime they wished. Taking those spinning discs apart was a wonderful past time and those little machined parts were amazing pieces of technology. Today, there are no moving parts in the solid state hard drives. The cost of getting a spinning hard drives still exists and are in most common home computers and lower cost laptops. But, if you order either as a new item, there is an option to allow you the best for a little more in cost. The SSD or Solid State Disc can be installed in both and will make your computer transfers a little more efficient and faster. I once had a spinning hard drive that spun at 15000 rpm and supposedly copied and transferred at break neck speeds. But, is not faster and more secure as the current solid state drives. So, for the current situation, copy those CDs onto solid state drives and have a secure future. CDs were once the top of the line in recording and transfers, but it is like a miniature LP Album record. They scratch, become brittle and break if mishandled. They get degraded as they get used...and you need a recording disc player to use and record said items. That is old school if you choose to look at it that way. One day you will have to transfer all of them. Jnaki Also, in an emergency, those CDs aren't the most efficient items to grab and exit as fast as possible. My son wanted me/us to grab his photo albums in case of a fire at his house. Ha Ha...two old seniors grabbing 15-18 photo albums loaded with valuable photos and exit? We told him the only thing valuable was his toddler daughter and that was it. He was not happy, but started to transfer all of those photos onto external hard drives and eventually on to big SSD drives. Now, they have a "cloud" service that they pay money monthly for storage. It is off site and secure, so they are happy. We are new/old school. We have fast new home computers with solid state hard drives. Super lightweight laptops with solid state drives and of course, several solid state drives used as our primary file backups and security. All of our original spinning discs are in storage as old technology, useful for our granddaughter's kids to laugh at their "great grandparents stuff." The choice is yours. Off site service is secure in case something goes haywire at your house, but what are the chances? Cloud service seems logical in case your phones go kaput, so recovery is simple. The simple cloud transfers are how computers and laptops should be. (SSD EXTERNAL DRIVES) That is also how companies intrigue you with offerings from photobucket or any of the hundred sites offering security...errr hostage.
SSDs may or may not be forever....they have ways to fail, too. Redundancy is a good thing. So is occasionally replacing the media, whatever it may be, with something fresh, but keeping the old one around just in case.
I find it wild that they have electronic control over images with their code everywhere they are posted....
I used PB for posting on boards that didn't have photo storage. I used it as a backup also, I kept the originals on my home computer and a copy of some of the most important ones on PB. Then I lost a computer at home, so I figured my backups were safe. Then a few years later, another crash on another computer, more pics lost, but still had backups on PB. For no particular reason, I never tried to retrieve them from the hard drives, just figured the PB backups were good enough. Then they got greedy.... As soon as I could, I downloaded all my pics to the new home computer, they were sent as zip files. I then deleted some of them off of PB that weren't important. I still get the notice that I'm over the allowable free storage limit. I started using flickr as a backup. Good thing I did.......now I have another computer that has crashed. Can't complain, this one lasted 10 years. This time though, I'm going to try and save the hard drive and use it as an external drive so I don't lose what's on it.
I'm not sure where you got your first quote, but it is misleading. SSD drives have a fixed lifespan based on the number times each cell is written to. Here's what a data recovery company said about it: "While normal HDDs can – in theory – last forever (in reality about 10 years max.), an SSD lifespan has a built-in “time of death.” To keep it simple: An electric effect results in the fact that data can only be written on a storage cell inside the chips between approximately 3,000 and 100,000 times during its lifetime. After that, the cells “forget” new data. Because of this fact – and to prevent certain cells from getting used all the time while others aren’t – manufacturers use wear-leveling algorithms to distribute data evenly over all cells by the controller. As with HDDs the user can check the current SSD status by using the S.M.A.R.T. analysis tool, which shows the remaining life span of a SSD." SSDs are good tools, as long as you understand and prepare for the end of their useful life. Brent (retired IT guy)
Hello, Thanks for the update. Yes, like all things, there is a dead end. But, "3,000 and 100,000 times during its lifetime?" That is almost 200 plus years. I have owned the 4gb solid state drive for two years. It has been updated three times. So, I am on my way to 99,997 more times of updates and transfers. I should make it to 99,980 if possible. My granddaughter should be able to get it lower to maybe 99,000 at the rate she does stuff on her phone and laptop. All kidding aside, I was just pointing out that we all went through that early moving hard disc phase and with our troubles in each version. We all adapted to the newest and safer technology. Like I said, I thought the 15000 rpm moving hard disc was fast and secure. I still have that one in some drawer, (but it has been replaced by a large SSD) has worked for many years, and is/was still plodding along until the new guy rolled into town. I am nowhere near the 4000 uses on even that early moving drive. It was time to move on to a more secure and faster way to update everything and transfer new stuff to the latest SSD. Jnaki Thanks for your thoughts and expertise. We do what we can to preserve our long time history for our next generation of family members and so on into the future. We thank our parents for the ancient photographs and stories. This is how we, in our generation, store and save our valuable historical stuff. Who knows what the next step will be or the next version of storage and transfers for us common folks and our families. (certainly not photobucket or those places.)
The Jalopy Journal
