The New Photobucket

EDITED FEBRUARY 19, 2022 TO UPDATE THE NEW NOTICE AFTER SIGNING IN.

Is absolutely not all crap. Although, I had to open a customer service ticket yesterday February 26th 2021, as after nine attempts, NINE (9)!!! My email address still was not validated in their system which meant I could do NOTHING with any part of the site. Thankfully it was quickly handled, once I provided the agent with the email address and user name for the account. Nothing more and today I find myself looking around this new “improved” Photobucket.

You may run into one of these two situations right after logging in, don’t worry, read on:

I just hit the ‘Temporarily dismiss this notification’ and moved on. I have no clue which images are where so I’m not even going to bother trying to figure it out. YEARS of using this account and there is images EVERYWHERE, which is what I used Photobucket for!

Edit: Seems like Photobucket has decided that you can no longer ‘temporarily dismiss’ this message. Don’t worry. All you need to do is sign in and if you get the page with the ugly red background just go up to the URL and delete EVERYTHING after .com then hit enter. You will then be taken to your account where you can access your images.

If you get this, just delete everything after .com in the URL address and hit enter.

Of course the first thing I did, is to try and use the old post directions on getting all your photos from them and sadly it won’t work. Much has changed including my ability to share photos. My first thoughts about this new Photobucket is that it’s not very different than the old. However it does have a different look when you first jump on. You not only have the albums listed to the left, but you have them listed right in the middle. This can be turned off of course, just click on the Album Previews button. But for the sake of getting your photos downloaded, let’s leave this on.

No longer is there a way to “easily” select all the images in a single album. There are no Next Page either as when you scroll down to the bottom of the page, if you have more images than what has already been shown, they’ll come up. This will continue until all of the images in that particular album is showing. From there it’s actually easy to select them all as you do not have to click on each and every one. Just start at the bottom and click the very last image, then scroll to the first image of the album and while HOLDING DOWN THE SHIFT KEY click on it. All the images in the album should now be selected. I found that when I went from the top to the bottom basically doing the same thing clicking first image, scroll to the bottom hold shift key down and click last image, the first four images were not selected. I had to go back and holding down the Ctrl key click on the images not selected.

Next at the top you should see a menu. If you run your mouse over each icon you will see what they are.

Now I couldn’t share any photos, even if they were not randomly hidden. I did not get any messages saying this is a paid feature when I tried either so I’m not sure what is going on there. But let’s get cracking.

You have more than one album? Don’t worry. You won’t have to go into each and every album and select all the images, or even do what I already laid out above and have to select the last image and then Shift + Click the first. Thankfully it seems Photobucket has made it a wee bit easier.

Remember that Album Preview box I told you to leave checked? Good! Now scroll to the bottom where it shows a box that says “Load More Albums”.

Click on it and scroll to the bottom again and click on it again until it no longer shows up. This should show you all of the albums you have on your account, minus the My Bucket album. Like with the single album, start with your last album and click on it, then scroll to the top and hold down the Shift key and click on the first album. You should have a blue square around each section showing that it has been selected as well as the words Deselect # just to the left of the useless Share icon. # will represent the number of albums you have selected. In my case it’s 61.

If you notice in this image (that you can make bigger by clicking on it as it’ll open in a different tab), I did not select the first album. You may also notice that my Download icon is ‘missing’. This is because once I had all the albums selected I clicked on it. It has not yet come up with a where to save zip file window as it is populating over ten thousand photos into a zip file which is going to take time. So if you have more than 300 photos to download, you are going to wait a bit of time. So just let it sit in the tab and go do other things for a bit.

Happily it did not take forever for the zip file to be created. I’d even wager it happened within the hour. Yeah. ten thousand photos within the hour is pretty damn good. But no matter, just keep in mind that however many photos you stored there you’ll have to wait some amount of time.

Once the zip file is ready, it will pop up a window asking you where you wish to save the images. No matter what you are doing on your computer this will interrupt you. Unless you’re playing a game. Pick where you want them, change the name of the zip file if you wish and click save. The zip file will save to your computer and then you can go in and open the zip file – which is going to require a application that should already be on your computer to unzip the file. If you do not have one, you can use WinZip for free.

Now if you double click on the zip file you may get a window much like this. If you get the little box that asks you to purchase, just select close if you do not wish to purchase. Same if you get the larger box below. I know mine says WinRAR, but it’s just like WinZip but it also opens RAR files which are just like zipped files. Google if you want more info.

Just click on OK or the red X.

Did you notice how all of my photos are still in their original albums? You see that??? Even the albums that had albums INSIDE them are showing up as how they were organized on Photobucket which is a BIG win! So go ahead and right click the zip file and select Extract Here to have all of your images unpacked into their original albums. This too can take a few minutes if there’s a lot of them.

And that is it. While this is MUCH easier than it used to be and probably won’t be changing as much it had in the past, please still let me know if you’re having problems. Unless it has to do with photos missing from your albums as it is on the site, I can probably help you. Missing photos I cannot help with.

I know that Photobucket deleted quite a bit of my trip to Athens because I had the audacity to photograph famous but naked or almost naked statues. Sadly I did not have these images anywhere else as at the time. I uploaded them from the memory card to the site, then deleted what was on the memory card. I never got the chance to make a back up set when I got home because by the time that I did, they were ALL DELETED. You can see in one of the screenshots I still have some of the images, but none of the great statues or paintings. I did contact customer service about it which is how I found out WHY they were removed, but once they were removed there was no way to get them restored. If I had more money, I would have sued them as it was admitted that AI was what went through the images not an actual human. Things that looked like something naked was removed as well.

Now I have a whole different way of doing images from vacations – not that I’ve been able to take any in the last few years – which will include hard copy or other types of back up copies. I don’t trust Flickr with my images any more than I trust Photobucket.

I am hoping for less stress with this method and less updates. But as always let me know if you run into issues. I am not running any extensions and all this was done on Brave browser which is built off of Chrome. This should work with Firefox. The only difference I saw was that I got a No Hosting message when I logged in using Firefox.

I still can’t find a way to Share OR Edit OR move to another album. Even when I double click on the image to open it up. You know one that isn’t blurred out.

I’d like to pause to say I’ve looked through all the albums and saw that at some point my Facebook account was backing up to Photobucket which is probably where most of the bulk of these images came from (and from when I also backed up my mobile images). I didn’t realize this until I started looking to make sure the images weren’t altered or blurred because I didn’t give Photobucket any money. I haven’t found any evidence of this. It is all looking good to be honest.

Until Next Time, while it is now 2021 the world is still crazy and we still need to stay home, wear our masks when we are out for essentials and que up for the vaccine once we are notified we can get it. Stay strong, things are looking up and brighter!