Photobucket vs. WeTransfer

Photobucket used to be great in the late 2000s to early 2010s. Even free account holders could enjoy many of its features and quickly and easily share photos. However, these days there are so many better alternatives, while Photobucket's feature set has been limited to premium and higher-tier accounts. Cloud storage providers now offer generous bandwidth caps, so offloading media is a thing of the past - even for the most budget-conscious freelancers. Photo-specific features provided by these service providers are constantly improving. [...] As time goes on, the list of reasons that used to differentiate Photobucket grows thin given their [in my experience,] shady past in holding photos hostage without a premium plan, I can no longer recommend this service. Price-wise, only their unlimited plan is worth considering since, for capped storage plans, the usual suspects (Apple iCloud, Google Photos, Amazon Prime) have them beat. Likewise, Photobucket's built-in image editor is very convenient for making basic changes without having to fire up a separate photo editor

Incentivized

It is the most appropriate tool to quickly share documents with someone you don't want to give access to your company's own online library, yet you have to share files. It's great that there's no need to create a user, nor for uploading or downloading files. Just have in mind that the documents on the link have an expiration day!

Incentivized

• Houses very large photos that I don't have the capacity to store on my computer
• Allows for a great online backup just in case something happens with my computer or external hard drive
• Allows me to quickly and easily share photos with clients after their photoshoot is done
• Organizes photos into a streamlined setup

Incentivized

• You don't have to sign up for an account, you can just use it when visiting the website.
• It is really simple and straightforward to use.
• It has never failed me.
• It tells you when your files have been successfully sent and when the other person downloaded it.

Incentivized

• Plans are awkwardly priced compared to competitors
• [In my opinion,] made shady practices in the past forcing users to their premium plans

Incentivized

• With the free version, you are limited to 2GB of file transferring. Likely if you are sending lots of files, you'll be upgrading to Plus instead.
• Download links expire after a certain amount of time. It's important to download each link immediately and not forget where you left the downloaded files.

Incentivized

I am generally very satisfied with the service. The free version alone takes care of 90% of my needs. The same holds for a lot of other people. It's a very smart business model as it gained mass market appeal (e.g. personal use) and thereby carries a lot of trust. I also never had issues using it.

Incentivized

WeTransfer is extremely reliable 99% of the time. There has been twice in 4 years that their service was unavailable due to server outage for several hours.

Incentivized

I've only reached out to WeTransfer support once, but they were prompt, courteous, and answered my question. I assume that future interactions would be the same, I'm looking forward to being a long term customer.

Incentivized

[I] also had an ImageEvent premium account, and it was far easier to manage images in Photobucket. ImageEvent's UI is very dated, and its feature set has largely remained stagnant. Photobucket has evolved over the past decade and offers a clean enough user interface to quickly accomplish what needs to be done.

Incentivized

While Dropbox does offer features that WeTransfer does not in terms of collaboration & organization, WeTransfer is the better option for simple file transfers. In my experience, WeTransfer is much faster for uploads & downloads. The premium version of WeTransfer also offers a lot of customization options that Dropbox does not.

Incentivized

• The peace of mind is priceless. Time is money and I spend a lot of time stressing over accidentally losing files. This helps.
• I no longer have to use multiple services to send files to clients. It's more specifically designed for photos rather than documents of all types
• I want the positive experience for clients to continue from beginning to end and I like that this system is simple for them to use as well.

Incentivized

• When we've had our BETA testing programs for our products, we always used WeTransfer to send our BETA version of our products. Doing this using WeTransfer was free and we also didn't have to worry about unauthorized people later down the road downloading these versions as WeTransfer deletes the files after a small number of days.

Incentivized