Photobucket and Third-party Hosting

[[Co...]]

Hi,

 

For those members who use Photobucket for adding images to posts at BB and other forums (and blogs), you can no longer do this for free. Photobucket now charge $40/month or $400/year. What's worse, this is a retrospective action. So, all your old images will now instead be replaced by a placeholder image inviting you to update your account.

 

This action does not greatly affect BB (since we are not an image-based community), but certain off-topic threads will suffer more from missing images. Still, these threads tend to be ephemeral in nature, so probably not a great loss for BB.

 

If you decide to pay the extortionate fees to Photobucket, your images at BB and elsewhere should be displayed again. However, if you pay or not, I recommend that you login to your PH account and retrieve all your old images. This is a rather drastic move by Photobucket and it is anyone's guess where all this ends up. I suspect that few people will be willing to pay those fees - it is possible that Photobucket disappears (along with your images) at some stage. So, if your images are important to you, download them now. You can always upload them again to a new image host. But, editing (where forums and blogs allow) your old posts and comments to reflect the new location might be a rather arduous task (hundreds or thousands of posts and comments to edit).

 

One other suggestion: do not not remove/delete your images from PH. Instead, just copy them. If PH receive a enough complaints, it is just possible that they (partially) reverse course so that this change to their TOS does not act retrospectively. I am not holding my breath, but if this should occur, all your old images will come back up.

[[Ms...]]

Wow, I guess they're desperate, those type of changes never work, especially when there are free, better competitors like imgur!

[[Gr...]]

I joined Photo Bucket years ago and paid a one time fee. For some reason I'm still able to access my images there and hope it continues.

[[me...]]

I couldn't access my Photobucket pictures anymore, and I'm not paying them $399, so on recommendations I joined IMGUR.  It's free, easy to use, and is a lot like Photobucket.