What is photobucket & it's pros and cons?

Hi all,

Please could you tell me, exactly what is Photobucket?, what is it's purpose, and what are it's pro's and con's?

cheers Steve.M.

It's an online hosting service where you can lodge your images. This means that you can create a link between your image on Photobucket and the forum here at PU. So your images can be shown in the forum.

Photobucket is a lot more things besides that, but you need to have a look because I haven't tried any of the other features.

It's free, so I don't see any downside for the purposes of this forum.

Photobucket offers you the ability to share your photos with others, either by sending them a link to the photo or album, or my hotlinking it in a forum.Most photo hosting sites do not allow hotlinking so Photobucket is very useful for that. If you have your own website you can probably hotlink from that, but even then a Photobucket account is useful for photos you only want to display for a short time/ don't want clogging up your webspace/ want to maintain your web anonymity on forums.
There are groups you can join, a basic editing facility, slideshow possibilities and you can upload videos too - useful for all those potential K7 owners out there

Photobucket is more than good enough for hosting photos to link to in this forum, but there are services with more features and more attractive presentation and navigation if you want people to view many of your pictures directly on the hosting site. www.pbase.com is excellent for that.

In Photobucket, I particularly don't like it that you can't go directly from one full-size image to the next in the gallery with one click; and the smaller versions it first displays are crudely resized.

Note that the max image size with a Photobucket free account is 1024x768.

Photobucket is best used as a file dump. In other words, you shouldn't use it when you expect your viewers will be looking at your images ON photobucket, but when all of your use will be embedding your images on other sites (forums, your blog, etc.) In that regard they are actually very good because the free accounts get oodles of bandwidth (about 10Gb) and (unlike Flickr) you don't have to link back to Photobucket when you embed your images.

Yes you can. In the corner three thumbnails are shown. Click on the next one and the next full size photo appears.

No it doesn't with one click.

When the thumbnails are shown, the main image is not full-size (unless perhaps your full-size image is very small?). You have to click it to see the full-size image, then the thumbnails disappear. That would be alright if there were "next" and "previous" buttons with the full-size version, but there are not.

I have suggested the improvement to Photobucket. They ignore me.

picasa is good, and has a desktop software component with basic editing features - I like the way it organises things easily into "albums" too - there's Flickr too of course which is very good. I have "pro" accounts on both lol

Before anything else, check terms of service.
More and more are claiming ownership of anything that passes through their servers. I thought Picasa had some issues for a while... don't know about now. Just check and make sure you are not allowing someone else to sell your work.

Photobucket are excellent except for the adverts but if you go pro(i think) there are no adverts.

Your right go pro no ads.

yes dear, your thinking very good

ok thanks