Photobucket... the New Red X - Treehouse Treasures

There is a new menace around the graphics community.

Is it a spammer?

Is it a troll?

What is it??

It`s the dreaded third party hosting graphic that Photobucket (Pb) replaces your wonderful images with

now that they changed their TOU. In this message I will refer to it as the "party" image

Remember the old days when we would complain
about seeing the red Xs?

I did a test today to see if my siggy would appear

if I hyperlinked it to Pb. I thought I read somewhere that this is how Pb wanted images shared. That didn`t work

; my siggy was still replaced with the party image.

You can still see the siggy (or image) if you really want to. Just right-click on the party image and choose "View Image". You`ll end up going to the Pb gallery view and you`ll probably still see the party image. Right-click and choose View Image again and you`ll leave the gallery view. The party image will still be visible, but if you refresh the page (F5), the actual image will appear. If you don`t see the image, try refreshing again.

This is a long and drawn out process just to see one image at Pb, but if you are determined to see something, at least there is this option.

I visited a Pb account while I was looking for something, and I could see thumbnail images on the main page where the images are stored in an album. When I clicked on one of the thumbnails to view it full size, Pb took me to the gallery view and the party image was displayed. So even though I could see the thumbnail view in the album, Pb still tried to prevent me from seeing the full-size image. My instructions above will allow you

to see it in full size if you follow the steps.

I think this may be helpful for people who have PSP tubes in their accounts that they are sharing for challenges. In a roundabout way, you can still get access to them.

These instructions are for how I was able to view an image in a "partied" account. I am using Firefox and Windows XP, so these instructions may or may not work for you as they work for me.

As always, I`d love to hear your feedback on whether these instructions work for you in whatever browser or operating system you use.