Our VP of Marketing, David Toner, talks about how the all-new Photobucket serves the needs of today’s consumers, their fragmented photo libraries and stories:
In the News: Image Hosting Pioneer Photobucket Expands Video Storytelling
Category Archives: Products
Our Guide to Giving Mom a More Memorable Gift This Year
Spring has sprung and Mother’s Day is right around the corner. It’s time to find a thoughtful gift for Mom, and Photobucket is here to the rescue!
What better way to honor Mom than by sharing your favorite memories together? With just a bit of planning, you can easily create a fun photo gift that she’ll cherish for years to come. 
Below are a few tips for creating – and giving – an unexpected gift for Mother’s Day that will allow her to relive happy moments…and put a smile on her face every single day.
From photo books to mobile phone covers to wine openers and more, there are all sorts of gifts you can personalize for Mom. First is to decide what type of gift you’re creating and how many photos you’ll need to use (see our ideas at the end for inspiration), then comes selecting the best shots to showcase in your gifts.
Create a collage of baby pictures, a remembrance of a favorite day or even a collection of shots of her whole brood. Whichever you choose, you can upload your mobile phone pictures and photos onto your PC with ease to create a new Mother’s Day-themed album on Photobucket in which to store these shots for safekeeping. You can always edit them down later, but having them all in one place will give you easy access and will make the project go much more smoothly.
Finally, print your gift by visiting our handy photo gifts page to design your project and have it delivered to your doorstep. It doesn’t get any easier than that!
Stumped on what to make to make Moms’ day? Here are a few of our favorite ideas:
- Family Photo Slideshow: Make a slideshow with family photos from throughout the past year. Place it on a digital photo frame, iPad or burn it to DVD for a gift that keeps on giving year-round
- DIY Photo Jewelry: Try a cool, DIY project that turns ordinary necklaces, bracelets, key chains and charms into these gorgeous photo keepsakes
- Hand-Picked Photo Book: A sweet album allows you to combine your favorite photos and quotes into a personalized album for mom. It’s so easy to create, and you can even view our video about getting started or learn more about our photo book types for added inspiration
- Custom Mobile & Tablet Cases: Check out our chic cases, where you can add your own photos and showcase her personality. Score some bonus points by putting the case on her phone Mother’s Day morning
- Stainless Steel Travel Mug: One of our most popular items, you can warm Mom’s heart (and her belly!) on those chilly morning commutes with this sleek, modern mug. Add your favorite photos to ensure she’s got miles of smiles ahead of her!
We hope this post has brought you some Momspiration for the May 12, 2012 celebration, and don’t forget that these ideas can apply to Dad’s and grads in the coming months, too!
Powerful, intuitive, creative: Meet Our New Photo Editor
If you saw our recent 2012 recap, you know that we’ve been working hard to create a complete, best-in-class user experience for our Photobucket community, regularly releasing features and improvements as part of the new site rollout.
Since launching the all-new Photobucket site back in August, we’ve added Stories, shared your best adventures (see Summer Brennan’s $25K winning Story here), built out features, and continued to enhance the site based on feedback from you.
Now, as we prepare to migrate all customers to the all-new Photobucket site, we’re announcing the latest improvement: our editing experience.
We’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with Aviary, the industry leader in photo editing. Aviary’s editor is powerful enough for our power users, yet intuitive enough that beginners can jump right in.
Here’s what we think you’ll like about the new photo editor:
- Intuitive: Easily adjust the contrast, brightness and color of your shots
- Powerful: Utilize everything from cool effects to professional touch-up tools
- Creative: Have fun experimenting with new stickers and text options
Our new Aviary photo editor will not only allow you to discover new artistic tools and effects, but you can also edit and design your photos with ease (in just a few clicks!), thanks to easy photo effects, filter and editing tools.
The integration with Aviary will also enable us to offer a consistent editing suite – available immediately on the web (and coming this spring for mobile and tablet) – for a more cohesive Photobucket experience. Give it a shot: we’re confident that you’ll see it’s never been easier to bring your photos to life, and adding a professional touch to your images has never been so simple.
We hope this helps you to get more creative with your existing memories and inspires you to create some new ones to store and share on the all-new Photobucket.
Updated Scoop on the Latest Updates to the All-New Photobucket!
February 7, 2012 update: As we mentioned in our recent blog post, we’ve been hard at work releasing features and making improvements on the new site (thanks for your feedback – and keep it coming!). We’re excited to announce the first two updates related to linking and editing:
First, the linking news: Easier link copying is now ready. Yes, you asked, and we listened – easy linking mode is now available via the all-new Photobucket user experience.
What does that mean? Well, we will be offering the same easy access to links (direct, email & IM, HTML, and IMG) as historically available on our original Photobucket site – only this time it’s quicker and easier to do.
In your User Settings, under the Album tab, you will find an option to turn on Easy Linking Mode. Enabling it will display the codes below the thumbnails in your albums for easy copying and linking of your photos. Simply double click the code and either right click on your mouse and copy or press Ctrl+C after the code is highlighted, then paste as you please.
Second, the editing news: An improved editor is now available. That’s right, we’ve unveiled an improved editor, which will be easier for editors of all levels to use, on the all-new Photobucket.
Please note: The old editor is no longer available on the original site, so now is the perfect time to make the switch if you haven’t already!
Photobucket’s 2012 Year in Review
Every year around this time, I like to pause and take a moment to reflect on the past 12 months and think about the successes and lessons learned while planning ahead for the next 365 days. It’s been a whirlwind of a year, but we’ve certainly got a lot to celebrate – and much more to look forward to in 2013!
Photobucket marked 2012 by transforming the act of photosharing into the art of storytelling. As the world’s leading consumer service dedicated to preserving and sharing the entire photo and video lifecycle, we are committed to being the one place where you can keep all your memories – and do literally anything you want with them, whether that’s emailing an album link, embedding in your blog, creating a social scrapbook or even designing traditional photo gifts for giving to friends and family.
Numbers-wise, we continued to keep our momentum up, thanks to our very active, very loyal base of users. Thanks to you, we’re still the largest dedicated photo and video site, hosting more than 10 billion images from 100 million registered members, who upload more than four million images and videos per day from the Web and connected digital devices. That’s a lot of memories entrusted to us, and we don’t take that responsibility lightly. In fact, our customer support team took to social media this year in full force via a dedicated Twitter handle and Facebook team to respond to your questions, comments and concerns.
Most recently, we celebrated the launch of Photobucket Stories with a $25,000 Life’s an Adventure contest, in which we received more than 4,700 entries, thanks to an active and engaged community (1M+ strong on Facebook!). It was a close race, with more than 475,000 of you taking to social media to get in on the action and cast your vote for your favorites by entering, commenting, liking and sharing them. In the end, though, Summer Brennan was crowned our champ with her touching story about her adventures in horse training titled, “Amado: Befriending a Wild Mustang.”
As evidenced in Summer’s tale, Photobucket Stories provides users with an easy new way to combine photos and videos into complete, sharable narratives – with photos, video, text, social collaboration and sharing capabilities, and more (see another great example here). It’s something we’ve worked very hard on and were proud to include on the heels of our release of the all-new beta Photobucket user experience this year. As a result, the site has seen significant increases in user engagement, as Stories continues to help us transform the act of photosharing into the art of storytelling.
Another exciting development that combined the power of Stories with the popularity of holiday cheer was our promotion with Twentieth Century Fox’s family movie comedy, PARENTAL GUIDANCE. This partnership marked our first launch of a marketing campaign including the Photobucket “Stories” platform. PARENTAL GUIDANCE Stories includes an inside look at both families – “old school” and “new school” – featured in the film, along with their respective (and humorous!) generational differences.
Along with those developments, we announced an exciting partnership with Windows 8 as a photography app available in the new Windows Store to help users encourage and enhance their creativity. We also took some time out to focus on the little things with our dedicated PB Loves gallery, which is a collection of things that make the Photobucket staff happy, whether it’s a favorite photograph, funny snapshots or moment that’s been memorialized – all put together to keep inspiring you.
So, as you can see, we’ve had quite the year, and we’re excited to carry on the positive momentum into the next year and beyond, with plans for more product enhancements, mobile updates and launches, additions in functionality and features, new and novel tools…and much, much more.
A few sneak peeks? As we continue to evolve the all-new Photobucket site, we’ve added all the features that linkers love, plus we’ll also be rolling out an improved editor and evolving the new Plus service to better suit your needs. Stay tuned for more details soon!
Thank you again for your support this past year, and we look forward to celebrating and sharing more milestones with you in 2013.
-Tom
If a picture is worth 1,000 words, your story may be worth $25,000!
That’s right – you read it correctly. We’re giving our fabulous
Photobucket fans a chance to showcase their creativity in our “Life’s
an Adventure” contest for an opportunity to win $25,000 (and just in
time for the holidays, too!).
Participating is easy; simply submit your entry in ‘Photobucket
Story’ form via Photobucket.com/StoryContest for
consideration. Entries are being accepted now through December 9, and they will
be judged on a combination of creativity, adherence to a theme and social
engagement. Winners will be announced on December 14.
Haven’t heard about our new Photobucket Stories yet? Stories
allows you to easily create and collaborate on living stories by inviting
friends and family to contribute photos, video and text to a single, sharable
canvas. Once Stories are created, they are easily embeddable on blogs, personal
and brand sites, and can be shared among friends from mobile devices or across
Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.
To understand how Stories works, and to prepare for your contest
entry, you can see some examples of recent Stories created on Photobucket here:
- A Postal Love Story: Storybook style
story of topical event happening in a Denver Neighborhood - Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto! (Japan 2012): A travel journal
of an adventure in Japan - Island Life: Outer Hebrides, Scotland: An exploration of
Outer Hebrides, Scotland
So,
what are you waiting for? Chronicle and share your most interesting exploits
for an opportunity to win $25,000. Happy snapping, sharing and storytelling!
Tell Your Summer Story!
You took tons of summer photos, and want to make them look their best before showing off, so today we're going to show you cool ways to Share, Print and Edit your photos with those you care about the most!
With a few clicks, you can turn your summer photos into creative projects. Here's how:
- Log in to Photobucket and click "edit photos" at the top of the page. Select the image you want to edit, which will then launch the image editor:
- From here, you can make your summer photos pop with the "Color Splash" effect, or add a cool summery look with the "Cross Process" effect on the Retro Tab. Don't forget to take a look at the other tabs on the page, as there are tons of sweet ways to edit your photo!
- To watch a short tutorial on editing ideas, click here!
Sharing your summer photos or even a whole album is fast and easy with Photobucket! Here's a quick way to share a photo:
- Log in to your Photobucket account and hover over the image you want to share.
- Click the "Share" button. You'll see some options like these:
- Click the option that fits your need. You can share using Facebook, Twitter, email and more. Add a message and tell your friends and family what your photo or video is about!
- Watch a short tutorial showing you how easy it is to share!
Printing photos is a great way to always have your stories with you. From simple prints to fun collages, we offer great options for you to print your summer moments. It's easy:
- Log in and click "My Home" at the top of the screen.
- Click "Order Prints & More".
- We have partnered with the leading printing service, Lifepics, for all your printings needs. You can order prints, make cards, calendars, photo books, and gifts of all sorts!
- Click here to get some fun ideas on print projects and learn more!
We hope you enjoyed learning about the easy and fun ways to share your summer memories with friends and family! Keep an eye out for further features we're bringing you at Photobucket!
Photobucket CEO Tom Munro Interview with Robert Scoble
Hey Photobucket fans,
Check out this great video of Robert Scoble (@scobleizer on Twitter), talking with our very own CEO of Photobucket, Tom Munro (@tamunro on Twitter) about Photobucket!
Here's some highlights for you busy folks:
- Photobucket hosts approximately nine billion photos & videos!
- We serve over three, sometimes four bilion images across the web to about 2.5 million different web sites on a daily basis.
- With that capacity and scalability, Photobucket was an obvious choice for Twitter's photo service.
- Photobucket serves about 25 million photos from mobile alone every month.
- During our July survey, with 2,500 respondents, half of you who responded said you take video on their mobile devices at least once a week, and our trends show even more than that.
- Our new mobile app, Snapbucket allows you to keep your original photo, so you have permanence along with fun filters & effects.
- We're planning on a new release of Snapbucket that will incorporate social aspects as well as video filters & effects.
Thanks to all of you who help make Photobucket great!
Vizit Digital Frame
We’ve got a new awesome way for you to enjoy your photos with the Vizit digital picture frame. Simply plug it in and photos arrive in moments. Vizit is cellular, allowing the frame to work from anywhere (no WiFi hassle) and to have 2-way photo sharing. Each frame has its own email address that friends and family can send photos directly to. You can even remotely manage the frame from VizitMe.com. Check out the frame here and enter promo code: photobucket.
Photos in a Dash
Enjoy your photos on a Sony Dash! The Dash is a Wi-Fi multimedia hub that allows you to view your Photobucket albums and photos, watch videos and movies, and much more. The Dash also doubles as a digital photo frame so your favorite photos will always be handy. Other cool features include:
- More than 1,000 free apps available.
- Vivid 7" LCD capacitive touch screen.
- Ability to connect to the Internet using your home or office wireless network.
- Access to video clips, movies, music videos, and games.
- Supports Internet Radio playback from providers like Pandora.
- Built-in stereo speakers and headphone jack.
- Easy-to-use clock with customizable audio and video alarm.
- Customizable the home screen with your favorite theme.
- Compact footprint that maximizes counter, desktop, and bedside spaces.
- Two display positions for counter-top or desktop locations.
- Effects including rotate and zoom photos with a touch screen interface.
- USB 2.0 interface to playback content on USB devices.
Click here to learn more about the Dash!