This is an agapanthus. Or was. They bloom briefly around Christmas and then shrivel up. Like some photo sharing sites. Pardon the metaphor.

"Wait, what... what are you doing here? I thought you left PBase?", I hear you ask.

Yes, mostly.

Unfortunately shifting my galleries to their new home is taking more time than I have available. "Oh, that one should be straightforward", I thought, looking at one gallery with a couple of dozen photos in it. A week later I was still updating descriptions and GPS locations and what have you. (Although admittedly I did add all of the photos from that visit to my new album, including many that I had never added to my former PBase gallery. Thus, extra time was needed.)

Thus I'm still "here" for another year. True, this is the first picture I have posted for months, and I don't bother posting any new REAL images here any longer... But there is one thing I've been posting for several years now so let's once more, and possibly for the last time, see what the posting numbers have looked like on PBase over the last year.

Well, the good news is that it's the lowest percentage fall in the last 15 years, for what that's worth.
2019: -12%
2020, the Year Of Covid: -34.9%.
2021, still in lockdown: -11.34%
2022, when things returned more to normal: +8.97%
2023, back to sliding: -5.05%
2024, still falling: -6.89%
2025, a miraculous drop of only: -1.34%.

I doubt that this is indicative of a wave of new members so much as (best case) the site starting to hit rock bottom with its die hard membership core.

The bad is that (a) it is still falling and (b) for the first time the number is below 900K, the lowest on record.

The forums are functionally dead, as is Geotagging. Interestingly nobody has raised that issue in the Q&A forum, and the linked thread in the Feature Requests forum about it had under 20 views. Either nobody else has noticed or nobody cares that much anymore.

The Show and Tell competition, despite losing a couple of stalwart participants, had a brief resurgence around September where the number of entrants returned to hitting double digits (just). But it was still effectively the same handful of people swapping first place between each other. (Which may have accounted for the departure of said stalwarts, but who other than them knows?) That is, up until the debacle of the early December competition where the winner just went radio silent for almost a month despite the contest rules asking people not to enter if they can't run the next competition should they win. Gee, I hope he's OK! Oh wait... he turned up again a few days back with nary a word of apology or explanation to the people who had been waiting a month for a new competition.

That may not kill the competition, but I suspect that it's now on life support. Even more than previously. (One member who joined in 2023, and who had been participating in the S&T competitions, posted a follow up "nudge" to try to get the winner to post a new topic as late as 13 December. By 6 January he had cleared out all of his galleries bar 1 image, and appears to have departed without a further word. Which, I suspect, was not coincidental.)

In the meantime I asked a couple of AI instances for recommendations on photo sharing web sites. None of the AIs recommended PBase. When asked why their responses were along the lines that it is old ("antiquated" was the word that one of them used), not particularly visible, with a small and shrinking community, is not ever mentioned in articles on recommended sites and so on. Which I think the stats bear out, but it will be interesting to see what 2026 brings. Specifically, whether the number of posts really HAS reached a floor (or at least a relatively gentle slope), or whether 2025 was the proverbial dead cat bounce.

For certain values of "bounce", that is.
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Edit: I'd forgotten how much of a pain in the backside uploading to PBase is. Set the location manually. Set the camera lens manually. Fix non-ASCII characters manually. I sure don't miss any of that...