Housekeeping

I've got my list of ancient drafts down to about 30 now and, what with a low expectation of adding to my collection in vast quantities for the forseeable future, I'm going to be doing a bit of housekeeping this year. It's not exactly a priority task, but it's a fairly simple one... and it's largely down to Photobucket (again). Back in 2013, I posted about the issues I was having with the image hosting site, mainly that thumbnail links had to be generated one at a time. Since then, Blogger has made changes to its service that switches everything over to HTTPS, which is somewhat incompatible with Photobucket, flashing up errors about 'unsecure items' in each post that linked to images hosted by the third party. Thankfully, Blogger's own image hosting has improved to the point that I've not used Photobucket since another problem arose in March 2017, except for the previously existing drafts, and I've been working through those and replacing the links as I post them.

Of course, Photobucket has since made further changes to make even that more difficult... Part of the draw of the site when I first started using it was that I had very limited space on my computer at the time, and things like external hard disk drives and USB memory sticks weren't as common - or as cheap - then as they are now. What I used to do is transfer images directly from the camera to Photobucket, and then erase the original pictures so I could take more. Now I'm running a computer with vastly more internal storage, two external hard disks and myriad USB memory sticks, I always keep the images... But there's a huge number of legacy posts on this blog for which I no longer have the original, high res photos. The images on Photobucket are downsampled, but still decent... but Photobucket in its current form only allows users to download images one at a time. If the issue I had back in 2013 was unacceptable, this new development is even worse... and, from my point of view, amounts to the service holding my files hostage as they try to get me to pay out for a better version. Don't get me wrong: I'm glad they haven't immediately thrown everything behind a paywall, or deleted my free accounts, but I don't recall being informed of any of these changes, and I certainly don't like them.

Thankfully, I was able to source a third-party browser extension that adds a 'gallery download' button to the system, and have been downloading everything with a view to deleting them from Photobucket and, potentially, closing my account before I have to pay for the dubious privilege of using their crippled service.

Many of these photos, it turns out, are already on one of my external disks, downloaded before the process was made more difficult. Still, better to have two copies than none, right?

At this point, aside from a few anomalies, everything from August 2011 to date, and the few posts from 2008 are up to date and no longer link to Photobucket. The process of making the shift is reasonably quick and straightforward but, short of doing nothing with my life but updating my back catalogue, I probably won't finish within the week... But hopefully within the month.