Photobucket

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Photobucket
Web address photobucket.com
Commercial? Yes
Type of site Image hosting service
Registration Optional (required for uploading files)
Available language(s) English
Owner Photobucket Corporation
Launched 2003
Alexa rank negative increase 210 (February 2014)[1]
Current status Active
Photobucket headquarters in Denver, Colorado

Photobucket is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community created by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal dedicated to preserving and sharing the entire photo and video lifecycle. Photobucket hosts more than 10 billion images from 100 million registered members, who upload more than four million images and videos per day from the Web and connected digital devices. Photobucket's headquarters are in Denver with regional offices in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco.. The website was founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal and received funding from Trinity Ventures.[2][3] It was acquired by Fox Interactive Media in 2007. In December 2009, Fox's parent company, News Corp sold Photobucket to Seattle mobile imaging startup Ontela. Ontela then renamed itself Photobucket Inc. and continues to operate as Photobucket.[4]

Photobucket is widely used for both personal and business purposes. Links from personal Photobucket accounts are often used for avatars displayed on internet forums, storage of videos, embedding on blogs, and distribution in social networks. Images hosted on Photobucket are frequently linked to online businesses, online auctions and classified advertisement websites like eBay and Craigslist.

History

Photobucket was founded in 2003 by alex welch and Darren Crystal and received funding from Trinity Ventures.[2][3] It was acquired by Fox Interactive Media in 2007.

In December 2009, Fox's parent company, News Corp sold Photobucket to Seattle mobile imaging startup Ontela. Ontela then renamed itself Photobucket Inc. and continues to operate as Photobucket.[4]

In June 2010, Photobucket was named in the Lead411's Hottest Seattle Companies list.[5]

Twitter announced in June 2011 that Photobucket will become the default photo sharing platform for Twitter.[6] According to a report by Sysomos, 2.25M images are shared on Twitter daily, which accounts for 1.25% of all Tweets posted.[7] Just before the announcement, TwitPic and Yfrog were the leading photo-sharing services.[citation needed]

Features

Accounts

Photobucket offers free and subscription based (Plus) accounts. Free account users receive 2GB of storage for photo and video uploads, 10GB of bandwidth per month for sharing and linking, and unlimited access to Photobucket’s editing, slideshow, and Story features. Plus accounts are structured into storage tiers and offer unlimited bandwidth, use of site features, and an advertisement free experience.[8]

Plus Subscription pricing:[9]

  • 2 GB - Free
  • 20 GB - $2.99 / Month, $29.99 / Year
  • 50 GB - $4.99 / Month, $49.99 / Year
  • 100 GB - $8.99 / Month, $89.99 / Year
  • 200 GB - $16.99 / Month, $169.99 / Year
  • 500 GB - $39.99 / Month, $399.99 / Year

Full resolution image backup

Photobucket stores the original photo file taken directly from a phone, camera, or computer without compression or resizing. The following image filetypes are supported by Photobucket. – gif, jpg, jpeg, png, bmp (.bmp files are converted into .png files.)[10]

Videos

Photobucket supports video uploads of 500 MB or less, and 10 minutes or less. The following video filetypes are supported– 3g2, 3gp, 3gp2, 3gpp, avi, divx, flv, gif, mov, mp4, mpeg4, mpg4, mpeg, mpg, m4v, wmv All video files are converted to .mp4 format after uploading.

Sharing

Sharing of photos, videos, and albums by email, instant messaging, mobile phone, and social media

Photobucket Stories

On November 15, 2012 Photobucket announced the availability of "Photobucket Stories" which provides users with an easy new way to combine photos, videos, and text into complete, sharable narratives. Photobucket Stories allows users to easily create and collaborate on living stories by inviting friends and family to contribute photos, video and text to a single, sharable canvas. Once Stories are created, they are easily embeddable on blogs, personal, and brand sites, and can be shared among friends from mobile devices or across Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.[11]

Editing

On February 6, 2013 Photobucket announced a partnership with Aviary, an image editing application suite.

Privacy

Photobucket has three privacy options for albums: public, private, and password protected privacy.

Public

When an album is public:

  • Photos and videos that have tags, titles, or descriptions display in Photobucket search results when someone searches for the terms in the tags, titles, or descriptions. NA as of March 18, 2013
  • Photos in the album may appear in other search engines like Google or Bing.
  • Users can follow linked photos on other sites back to albums and browse other photos in the album. NA as of March 18, 2013
  • Photos recently uploaded to the album appear on Profile page. NA as of March 18, 2013
  • Images will appear on the Photobucket Community page. NA as of March 18, 2013

Private

When an album is private:

  • Photos and videos in the album do not display in Photobucket search results.
  • Account followers will not see photos uploaded to the album.
  • Images uploaded to the album will not display on the user Profile page.

Password-protected privacy

When an album is password protected:

  • Users enter the password in order to view the album.
  • If someone searches for a username, they cannot access password protected albums unless they have a guest password.
  • Content will not display in search results.[12]

Fuskering

Although it is possible to set Photobucket albums to 'private', this does not prevent the photos within being accessed by someone who knows or can guess the URL. Programs called fuskers can test for likely photo URLs. This has led to 'private' photos on Photobucket being downloaded and distributed elsewhere on the Internet without the consent of their uploaders.[13][14]

Photobucket monitors suspicious activity to track for possible fuskers. However the easiest way to protect content is to scramble the links to photos and videos. Unless users have a need to preserve original file names, Photobucket recommends that users select this option to scramble both past and future uploads.[15]

Since Photobucket does not allow sexually explicit or objectionable content, they may remove content at their discretion due to violations of their terms of service.[16]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Photobucket.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2014-02-02. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2% of U.S. Internet Traffic goes through Photobucket
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 PhotoBucket Closes $10.5M From Trinity Ventures
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2010/02/05/it%E2%80%99s-official-ontela-bought-photobucket-from-news-corp/
  5. ↑ Lead411's Hottest Seattle Companies List
  6. ↑ Kiss, Jemima (June 1, 2011). "Photobucket: Twitter's surprise new partner for photo-sharing tool". The Guardian. 
  7. ↑ "How People Currently Share Pictures On Twitter". Sysomos. June 2, 2011. Retrieved June 2, 2011. 
  8. ↑ "Plus Subscription Pricing & Info". Photobucket Support. 
  9. ↑ "Plus Pricing". Photobucket. 
  10. ↑ "Supported File Types for Photos and Videos". Photobucket Support. 
  11. ↑ "Photobucket Unveils “Stories” Feature for Creating Lasting Multimedia Narratives". Photobucket. 
  12. ↑ "Album Privacy Explained". Photobucket Support. 
  13. ↑ Read, Max. "Ladies: 8,000 Creeps on Reddit Are Sharing the Nude Photos You Posted to Photobucket". Gawker Media. Retrieved August 16, 2012. 
  14. ↑ Notopoulos, Katie. "The Dark Art Of "Fusking"". BuzzFeed. Retrieved August 16, 2012. 
  15. ↑ "Keeping your photo links safe online". Photobucket. 
  16. ↑ Photobucket.com, Terms of Service

External links

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