And I’m not talking about Princess Bubblegum.

We’ve known Photobucket for over a decade now. Along with Imageshack, I used it to upload stuff to post on forums. It was handy and did its job.
I quit with Imageshack when that stopped being free, not like paying was worth it since half of my images were already broken beyond repair before I could download everything off my account.

I still used Photobucket for a bit (AB Summaries/Monthly Scans), but after their site design/UI change and the site only getting crappier, I moved to just uploading the pics here, or more recently on Imgur.

Today it came to my attention that Photobucket is about to pull the plug on hotlinking for free users. Or “third-party hosting” as they call it.

This being the final push, I decided to download everything off PB (just in case) and oh god, this is a terrible experience.

Now like any sane person, I already use an adblocker there so I won’t go on about how ad-filled PB has become. This is just about re-downloading your own images and the hurdles you have to go through.

First of all, you can “Download album”. Sounds much better than that 1 by 1 downloading I had to do on Imageshack, right?
But wait! There’s a catch!
No animated Gifs/Videos and no subfolders.

But the real problems start after pressing that link.
First of all, you get a captcha. Now it’s a flip of the coin if the captcha will load at all and another (if it did load) that it doesn’t break again.

Second, when you HAVE finally gotten past the captcha, there’s another coinflip! Chance that the DOWNLOAD button just.. Doesn’t respond. Even though it’s highlighted, ready to be pressed! IT DOES NOTHING!

No, it doesn’t end here

If you survive that, your download can either:

• Cancel
• Get stuck in a loop
• Deliver a corrupted ZIP

FAN. FUCKING. TASTIC.

As if the site wasn’t already slow as fuck, it has to error and corrupt everything in its path as well.

And I have 40 folders to go through.
Followed by finding all the animated gifs.
And I can’t just download them from the album, no. I have to fucking click on them first, then find that fucking tiny download button, then click through the whole saving process and PRAY the image hasn’t been broken beyond repair.

Now I hope this shit doesn’t happen with Imgur.

Fuck you, image-select Roads captcha, always breaking.