Photobucket question

erik · Post by **erik** » 7 Aug 2007 6:33 pm

When uploading a file you can click a box that says, "scramble file names so people can't guess your links". What does this mean?

Darren Harkins · Post by **Darren Harkins** » 8 Aug 2007 7:07 pm

It's to keep people from seeing other photos you don't want them to see.

Lets say you posted a link to a photo:

http://www.photobucket.com/img0001.jpg (example, not an actual link)

If I know that the file names are sequential, all I have to do is change the 'img001.jpg' part to 'img002.jpg' etc. to see other photos of yours. Scrambling them makes them next to impossible to guess.

erik · Post by **erik** » 9 Aug 2007 2:48 am

All my file names are names relative to the picture. So I assume it doesn't matter.

Dave Potter · Post by **Dave Potter** » 9 Aug 2007 5:35 am

erik wrote:All my file names are names relative to the picture. So I assume it doesn't matter.

I don't use Photobucket, so I'm unclear what kind of access people have to stuff you upload there. Any of these guys you?

erik · Post by **erik** » 9 Aug 2007 2:36 pm

That's funny you posted that, Dave. I just found out this morning that when you put a title on your picture it becomes fair game for the public to see through the search box. I DID in fact search "Erik" (you spelled it wrong

) and found many. I do have one picture with Erik on it but it also contains a modifier, if you will. You'd have to go through 10s, if not 100s of pages to actually see it. On the other hand, I made a movie of my mother's pics and it shows up within the first 10 pages. Guess they should warn you about titles more than file names. They do have secure albums but I don't know if it prevents individual pictures from being found.

Dave Potter · Post by **Dave Potter** » 9 Aug 2007 4:23 pm

erik wrote:That's funny you posted that, Dave. I just found out this morning that when you put a title on your picture it becomes fair game for the public to see through the search box. I DID in fact search "Erik" (you spelled it wrong ) and found many.

OK. I guess the point I was trying to make is that they have a search engine that seems to make quite a bit of their content public.