Potential Security Issue When Posting Pictures

It has just been pointed out to me that posting pictures from a photobucket account allows people to get full access to all the pictures you have in that account.

I posted a few bike pictures in the bike for sale section and if you click on them you can then scroll through all the pictures I have there which include my kids etc.

Not ideal. Perhaps I did something wrong?

Does anybody have any advice / thoughts on how to fix the issue??

Thanks and thanks to the member here who pointed that out.

You may want to check the privacy settings and adjust as necessary. Its the privacy tab under your personal settings

Just set your albums to private.

Then you create an album for each site or forum you want to post to. You set the privacy for these albums accordingly.

This way 100% of the pictures you upload cannot be accessed unless logged into your account, then the pics you want to share are duplicated into an album set to public or hidden (only people with a direct link have access to the picture).

Thanks for the advice but I'm afraid that isn't the solution.

There seems to be no global privacy settings in photobucket, you have to go into each folder one at a time and click a little lock symbol, select private and move on. Takes ages which wouldnt matter except...

It doesn't work!

All the pictures in my bike for sale listing are set private but click on them and then click on my bucket and you can look at anything, all the family stuff despite the lock being closed.

Might have to take the images out if there isnt a solution to this.

Thanks anyway for trying

Are you trying to open these links in an incognito window?

If you're clicking on them of course it's going to take you to your albums even if you change the privacy settings because you're still logged in.

If I go back to your old thread and click on the pictures then click on any other album it says private:



So it looks like you just need to make the other albums private as well.

A good way to stop this whole thing is to open the pic you want to link in photobucket, right click the picture and hit "open image in new tab" this will strip the picture of any url forwarding and hot link the image only. Bypassing the photobucket interface like this:



As you can see the pic no longer links to your photobucket at all.

I appreciate the attempt to help Aphex but I'm afraid that doesn't make the slightest difference.

I was using Edge or whatever it's called these days.

Based on what you said I went back in having restarted the PC and set each sub folder individually to private. Took a long time.

I then closed down the computer again. Restarted, logged into SD.net and clicked on the image in my posting. From there I could view all the images in every album and foldfer without restriction of any kind. I also tried on a laptop and my phone. All have free access.

People should be cautious. If you post a link to an image from Photobucket here (and possibly on any other forum) anybody will have access to view and copy any images you have in any other folders on your Photobucket account.

I haven't tried the opening individual images, right clicking and saving elsewhere alternative so that might work but sounds very long winded. Easier just to remove all image postings.

I'm going to dig a bit further but if no solution I available that's what I will do.

Advise!

Don't post pics of anything that you don't want others to see on the internet, final!
If you don't want others to access your kids pictures, changing the security settings is not going to do much.
If you want show relatives pics of their nieces and nephews, mail them.
If you use FB you might as well make billboards and advertise on TV....

This ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ is probably the truth but I need to apologise to Aphex.

When I tried again the folders marked private were no longer offered up for public consumption.

Obviously takes a few mins for the changes to work through the system. Thanks for helping out with that.

If you follow his suggestions the security issues are resolved.

You aren't the only one who does this.

That's why I always use an image hosting service that doesn't require a login.
e.g. http://tinypic.com/
or http://postimage.org/

Guys, All you need to do is insert as an image rather than the URL....

That way all we see is the image on screen and no link to the host website

Yes you can, Just use the image button here, copy the image address from the host and insert it.....