Repairing the Photobucket Mess

Today I finished the majority of the work needed to restore my images to my posts over at The Airfix Tribute Forum. I’ve repaired all the group build, demo build, portfolio and individual aircraft type pages. All that is left now is to repair my “works in progress” thread and any other miscellaneous posts that had images. I’ll attend to them one by one, as the next five months go by. The administrators have announced that they will tolerate broken images for five months, then start to delete any posts that no longer have images.

Fixing the broken links is a terrible pain in the rear. I’ve found that moving the images to this server (thebrushpainter.com) makes it reasonably easy to repair the broken links. All I had to do was download them from Photobucket to my hard drive, then upload them to the image (media) manager included in WordPress. Then I can select an image, copy the address, and use this address to change the address of the image in the post.

The best way to to this is to use a great little program called TextPad. TextPad is not free. It’s free to try, but you have to buy it if you want to keep it. So I did. It’s that good and the price (under $30) was right. Buying software like this may rub some folks the wrong way but in this case I reward people who do good work.

TextPad has an excellent “find and replace” feature that remembers what you are finding and what you are replacing. I can do some work, shut it down, go back to it a week or two later and it has saved those values. I don’t have to re-enter the information. Furthermore, TextPad does not add any hidden code to your text. It’s a programmer’s word processor so what you see is what you get, unlike Microsoft’s old Wordpad or, especially, MS Word. Forget trying to use that for editing html in forum posts.

So I copy and past my postings into TextPad and replace the old address with a new address for all the images. Then I copy and paste the post back into the ATF editor and submit the altered post. Problem solved. The images now show up and all is well.

But this process is still very tedious. To speed it up, I found a free program called Tiny Task. Tiny Task records my mouse clicks and allows me to do the whole process of copy, paste, edit, copy paste automatically with a single click of the “play” icon.

Pretty cool.

1 Reply to “Repairing the Photobucket Mess”

  1. Ah, photobucket. What a mess it has created of the internet.

    I usually use Leafpad for those types of things, unfortunately it only works on Linux.

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