I’ve been using Photobucket for years, but the increasing number of idiotic additions to make it look fancy has taken it’s toll on user friendlyness. The last drop was the service no longer sending you directly back to the album after upload. I needed something else.

Photobucket has really become a piece of shit with a crappy flash uploader and Flash 10 ruining the auto-copy of URL’s. I just want a place to quickly upload pics and get a link for them, I do NOT want to edit title, caption, tag my friends, make slideshows, make postcards, plan my vacation or draw fake mustaches on my pictures. How hard is it to just let me do the core thing?? Apparently very, as I was unable to find a way to shut off all the crap.

The new “service” I found isn’t for everyone as it’s a self-hosted PHP script that gives you a UI for uploading files to a directory of your choice. FileThingie let’s you create users, they can log in, upload files and manage files already in the directory. Could it be any simpler? No, and that’s why it works. No crappy flash, no ads or dumb requests for using the Pony-fier to “make dah piz purty” or any of the other crap that picture sharing services spam you with.

The downside is of course that you have to host it yourself and so you need a server, but if you have that you’re all set. I’ve set up two, one for personal use (pics etc) and one with many users that me and my school mates use for sharing school related files. Definitely recommended to anyone fed up with the glorified services out there.