If you have been affected by the changes at Photobucket, and have found the photos you posted on the forums replaced by a Photobucket ‘ransom notice’, here’s what you need to do:

• Get hold of your photos. You may have them stored on your computer or elsewhere. If not, you may be able to download them from Photobucket, though currently this seems to entail downloading photos one at a time. Firefox works best. Right (Ctrl) click and ’Save image as’. (Michelle and Teri downloaded 3000 in this way, so if you’re thinking, ‘but I’ve got 150, I can’t…’) When you download your images, you may only see the ransom image, and think you are downloading that. Don’t worry. It is your image, not the ransom note that is being downloaded.  N.B. DO NOT CHANGE THE FILE NAMES AND DO NOT DELETE YOUR PHOTOBUCKET ACCOUNT. (If you have already removed your photos from photobucket and uploaded them to Imgur, you will not be able to use downloads from there, as they change the file names (which is what we use to locate the posts). You will need to locate your original images.)
• Upload your photos to a Tripawds blog. If you don’t have one, start one. You don’t need to use it to post blog updates if you don’t want to. It’s just somewhere to store your photos. It doesn’t matter if you include more photos than you have posted on the forums, and you don’t need to know which image went where (or even precisely which images they were). We can help with all that. You just need to make sure the images you posted are included in those you upload to the blog.
• When you have done both of the above, PM us, including one example of a page (both thread and page number) containing one or more of your ransom images. We will then give you the information you need to add us as (temporary) users to your blog.
• We will replace your photos in their original posts and remove the ransom images.

Please bear in mind that there is no quick fix to this situation. It involves our going through every single post and manually editing it. So far, we have completed Sally, Teresa and Michelle’s posts, as well as images Tripawds placed from their own Photobucket account on behalf of members. In the last two weeks we have devoted literally hundreds of hours to this task, but for the sake of our jobs, our animals and our sanity, we cannot sustain this pace. We absolutely want to help every single member affected (who wants our help), but please understand that this will take some time. 

In the same vein, we apologise if we have failed to respond to forum posts because we have been so focused on this. We hope you understand that we have been doing the best we can. We are now going to take a short vacation from the site, so please be aware that we may not respond immediately to PMs.

The Bucketeers

Holly (Purrkins), Teri (Teri) and Clare (Megstamum)