Today is a very exciting day for Photobucket and for our users as well. For months, we have been carefully listening to what you, our loyal users, wanted to see more of in the site and have been doing some heavy remodeling behind the scenes. We are incredibly excited to pull back the curtain, starting today for a portion of our users, and reveal a brand new Photobucket experience that we hope you’ll enjoy! 

Our generation captures and shares more photos and videos than any other. But as we take more photos on more devices and share them to more places, our digital portfolios have become fragmented and scattered. So while capturing and sharing has become easier than ever, management of all our photos and videos has become more difficult.

The all-new Photobucket is designed to address this issue by connecting all your devices, backing up all your photos and videos, and providing all the tools you need to easily create, share and protect your digital library. The new site debuts a sleek look and simplified design putting the most important items at your fingertips. There are also new features that allow you to:

• Automatically upload photos and videos from computers, mobile phones and social sites 
• Control what, where and with whom you share
• Utilize diverse creative features, including fast and easy-to-use editing tools
• Preserve all original images, maintaining the complete picture
• Ensure safe, secure storage of all photos and videos, forever

If you take advantage of the new Photobucket ecosystem, you will never have to worry about backing up again, and all your photos and videos will be in one place! If you haven’t received beta access yet, you can submit your email address to request a beta invitation to the all-new Photobucket here http://bit.ly/N2JRTm.

At Photobucket, our users and your images are the fabric of our company and why we come to work every day. We thank you for choosing Photobucket in the past and for helping to inspire and shape the new experience. We hope you love it as much as we do. And stay tuned — in a couple weeks we will share a completely new way to create, curate and share your stories.

That’s enough from us, please take a look around the new site and let us know what you think. Already, our private beta users have provided hundreds of comments that have led to many enhancements across the experience. Thank you, enjoy the new site and please keep your feedback coming. 

You may have seen the articles talking about "fusking" or the ability to gain access to private images on Photobucket. Protecting your privacy is paramount at Photobucket so we wanted to clarify what that means for those of you unfamiliar with the term and share how you can add a layer of protection. 

Unless you’ve renamed your photos, your image names likely follow a consistent format, such as IMG_1939.JPG, IMG_1940.JPG, IMG_1941.JPG. If you have a Private album with default photo file names and you share the link to one of the photos in that Private album, it could be possible for someone to guess the link to other photos in that same Private album, since the files have a similar name. If they guess the exact link, they may be able to see that photo even though you never shared the link with them.

Photobucket monitors suspicious activity to track for possible fuskers. However the easiest way to protect your content is to  scramble the links to your photos and videos. Unless you have a need to preserve your original file names, as some of our users do, we recommend that you select this option to scramble both past and future uploads.  

The option to scramble has been available for some time, but we realize that not all users were aware of this feature. Here are step by step instructions on how to scramble your existing links http://photobucket.zendesk.com/entries/21822222. On new accounts, scrambling will be the default setting.

Your privacy is paramount to our company and we strive to provide comprehensive, secure privacy options that satisfy all user types and needs. Please let us know if you have any questions.

Thank you,
Tom Munro
CEO 

It’s that time of year again… Tents are pitched everywhere as seniors in both high school and college are marking the end of their journeys and preparing for the next adventure. Parents rejoice as they watch the achievements their children have made and capture the moment on camera so they can remember the day forever. Don’t you remember the day you finally had your degree in hand?

Whether graduating from kindergarten, high school or college, photos are the best way to celebrate these academic milestones and achievements. We all have the obligatory “transferring of the diploma” and “shaking the hand” photos, but we want to see your best photo for our graduation contest. Maybe you did a cartwheel after accepting your diploma? Maybe you wrote a message to mom and dad with masking tape on top of your mortar board … or maybe you celebrated this rite of passage with all of your best friends? Whatever it is, we want to see your special moments caught on camera for our contest.

Can’t decide on your favorite photo? We have made it easy to gather together all your favorite photos and make a collage! Why?

• It’s an easy and fun way to tell a story from the entire day – relive the excitement over and over again.
• As always, we can also help you add filters, fix the dreaded red eye, decorate or personalize all of your photos for added effect.
• But most of all, we think you’ll love memorializing those moments in your own way – so tell us what you think!

Congrats to everyone who graduated this year, and we hope you enjoy the well-deserved summer break! We look forward to seeing all of your photos. Is yours the best?

It’s that time of year of parties, family gatherings, gift exchanges and that guilty pleasure of eating a dozen cookies. All this celebrating means it's time to charge your camera battery and make some space on that memory card of yours.

 Whether you are at a friend’s holiday party or taking family photos in front of the tree, we have your creative outlets covered! Each week, for the month of December, we are rolling out new special holiday photo effects. From blue winter tints, snowflake borders and pretty lights (bokeh), our image editor is your place for you to experiment and have fun with your photos. When you are logged in, look for all of our seasonal effects in the “Holiday Effects” tab in our free image editor!

Snowflake Border

Note to Santa Effect

Be sure to visit us every Tuesday as we will release new effects!

Happy Holidays from Photobucket! 

Hey Photobucket Users,

We wanted to let you know about a few cool new features we've made to the website:

Main Functional Changes:

• There are now additional share entry points.  This means that after editing or creating a slideshow, you’ll now be dropped into the share flow.
• Chunked uploads after a upload failure.  If your network connection goes south during an upload, we put you into “chunked” upload mode which is more resilient (but a little slower).  This should significantly reduce upload failures.
• Increased visibility for videos in image search.  When you search images, you’ll now see some related videos at the bottom of the results list.

Enjoy the changes and remember: Photobucket for life!

Hey US Photobucket users:

Did you know you can win a $200 gift card to Journeys, just for posting a color splash photo of your Chucks? Well, you do now!

It's simple to enter:

1. Color splash a photo of your Chucks in Photobucket and enter the contest here.
2. ???
3. Profit!

It really is that simple – so go grab your Cons and take a picture now!

Ever tried getting photos, let alone videos, off of your cell phone?  It’s hard!  Wouldn’t it be great if there was a service that automatically sent every photo and video you took with your phone to the cloud, so it could be accessed immediately from anywhere?

Photobucket is making saving mobile photos and videos simpler than ever.  With Photobucket Mobile for Android, users can pull out their cameras, take a photo or video, and put it right back in their pocket.  In minutes that image or video will be uploaded directly to a designated Photobucket account. 

Once the photo or video is on Photobucket, users can easily share it to all their favorite places: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, MSN Messenger, and email sharing are all made extremely easy. 

Photobucket Mobile is the easiest and fastest way to save every photo and video you shoot with your mobile phone. Can you do that with your mobile device camera?

Last month Photobucket conducted a survey to gauge the holiday photo and video taking habits of consumers.  Some interesting findings:

1. 82% of respondents intend to capture their holiday memories with a digital camera, while a significant number (27%) intend to use a phone/smartphone camera. Both were much higher than those planning to use professional photography (11%) or video (14%).
2. Respondents planned to share the memories they capture on social media sites (57%), online photo sharing sites (49%) and email (46%); all higher than those planning to print and mail pictures (27%).
3. One third of respondents said Mom would be respnsible for capturing holiday moments; dad came in at 17%.
4. While 87% of respondents use and online photo-sharing site, they clearly showed a lack of clear direction in their photo-filing behavior; the majority of those surveyed (53%) upload personal pictures to more than 3 sites.

Photobucket also provided tips for organizing holiday memories:

1. Get in the habit of transferring your pictures from your camera to your computer as soon as you can. You can even consider using an auto-uploader right from your smart phone or wi-fi enabled camera to eliminate that step and have them automatically appear online.

2. Create a well-organized system on your hard disk. Pictures can be saved to folders based on dates, places, people, events, etc. As soon as you put your pictures on your computer file them appropriately.
3. Back-up your pictures to an online photo/video site. Then, if your computer crashes or you spill egg nog onto your laptop, you will still have access to your files.
4. Take advantage of the features offered and edit your photos/videos, as needed. Don’t let the stranger waving in the background ruin a precious memory – learn how to edit him right out.
5. Share your photo albums with friends and family directly from the photo and video sharing site using email or social media sites. You can also easily share to your preferred social media sites directly from Photobucket – but remember to “tag” your family and friends responsibly.

To read more about the results of the survey, click here to read the press release.

You don’t have to wait until you get home to use Photobucket, take it with you everywhere you go.  You can upload photos from your phone to your Photobucket account, download wallpapers, and share photos easily through email.  You can also browse our “Find Stuff” categories to see what’s new on Photobucket, and search from our library with billions of images.  To learn more about the app, click here.