Well it affected me, and im buggered if im paying four hundy per year.

READ THIS

Saw this being discussed (hijacked) on another thread.

Mezo.

If people pay it Google and Flickr will follow. I switched to Flickr when Google started messing about with what they'd let you do.

Andy

Its not just my motorbike pics, i have used PB to host hundreds of pics on a chilly pepper growing forum, that thread is now dead as are millions of others.

All i got was an email Friday arvo asking for $400, that was it.

This is quoted from the Wiki just now:

As of June 30, 2017, Photobucket now requires $399 a year to allow linking of images to 3rd parties such as a forum. This change in policy happened with no warning.

Mezo.

Happen to me as well.
But the hard bit is if you decide to reload them using an another hosting company.
How do you work out what pictures to use?
The original has gone from view.
Holy shit

This is worse than a computer virus.
Did Photobucket asked to be paid in Bitcoins ??








⚠️ Questions about your account? We’re here for you! Send us a DM or email our team at support@photobucket.com.

— Photobucket (@photobucket) 27 June 2017

you are a DISGUSTING company @photobucket this is 100% blackmail. I have years of blog content on your platform, now forcing to pay 400/year

— Julia (@Contour_Affair) 27 June 2017

Hope you go out of business with this strategy. Not paying a $400 ransom, I'll find someone else to host my pictures.

— Ms. Virion (@Pathogenome) June 29, 2017

#photobucket right now pic.twitter.com/bFg0gwBTN8

— Rebecca Jo (@RebeccaJoKnits) June 30, 2017

Special congrats to @photobucket for killing their own site. No more 3rd party image hosting unless I pay $400/year? I'll go elsewhere, ty.

— Samantha Johnson (@srj_art) June 29, 2017

Just closed my #photobucket account that I've had for well over a decade. Thanks for breaking my pics in every forum I've used, @Photobucket

— David Jenkins (@m16a172) June 30, 2017


So from all the above commits and from me Photo****et

Go and **** spiders

This story is all over the net ... affects thousands of forums of all types.
Ruins continuity of a thread, really ... ruins forums once pics disappear.

I've heard ... but cannot confirm ... that if you sign up for SmugMug, you can transfer ALL your pics from PB over to Smugmug in one go. If anyone would know how ... it will be the SmugMug gang. (some work at Google, so they know about this sort of thing)

I was an early SmugMug subscriber so got a lifetime deal of $30 a year. Now it's a bit more ... maybe $50 a year? Dunno. Ask them. Very reliable site and with staff you can actually TALK TOO if you have a problem. Very helpful kids there.

Imgur is also a good alternative for hosting images. I have been using it for the last few years without any problem.

Sure there all alternative hosting sites, but who is going to bother editing all previous posts on multiple forums, not me.

Mezo.

Sign up to Imageshank.com and get 50% discount, only $18.99 a year.

Excuse me from being a retard with anything internet based, but I assume we're talking about some off-line storage site like CLOUD where people store their data.
Due to utterly CRAP internet speeds where I am, I don't know anyone who uses them. I personally use my external hard drive and back-up every few weeks.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

It'll be interesting to see how this pans out; whether it's the beginning of the end for free 3rd party hosting like Photobucket and others were offering or whether the uproar over what they've done to countless forums and their knowledge base will cause some reconsideration.

It's not as if everyone who used the 3rd party linking option on Photobucket were somehow doing something underhand that the management have only just discovered. It was a mainstream feature of the site and one of the reasons many people opened accounts in the first place. Without it I doubt I'd have even heard of Photobucket never mind been a user for the last 10yrs or so.

If the core issue is that "freeloaders" like me have been using the site but not spending any money there then that does reflect more on their business model than my morals; if they had something I wanted or needed to buy then I would have been a paying customer. Just another site though - and one with such poor bandwidth that's it's often unusable - offering to print my photographs onto a coffee mug doesn't get me coming back that often.

I wonder how much thought was given to the knock on consequences of the action they took. They can of course do whatever they wish with their own site but totally ignoring the effect their decision has on other parts of the internet does smack of either naivety or callousness, neither of which are characteristics I'd like to have in a business I pay money to and /or depend on. Whether any of the more litigious parts of the Photobucket community consider there's a legal responsibility to maintain the existing links will be interesting to see.

So, what's likely to happen from now on? There are a few other free hosting sites but tbh I'm not going to rush to swap over and also I'm not going to pay $20 /30 a month (or even a year) to have the facility to post a few pictures here and on a few other sites. I could host images on my own website and link them through but a. it'll require me to spend some time working out how to do it and b. as my signature link to the (non commercial) site fell foul of the mods as unpaid advertising some time back I don't feel like doing it anyway.

If Photobucket et al are really going to be pay or leave (for 3rd party linking anyway) I wonder how many here will pay? If only a few stalwarts are able to post images will that make a difference to the look / feel of the site or will it be yet another headache that Grant will have to deal with?

Click on the READ THIS link in the first post.

__________________
"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)

I've too have been using SmugMug.com as my host for my photo albums for many years now. I pay GBP29.05 (GBP24.21 exc VAT) per annum. I think this converts to about USD35 pa.

SmugMug is a fab service that consistently over-delivers on its service standards.

These proliferate freebie sites - including Facefart, the Twatter, et al - just always bear in mind; if it's free, then you (and/or your bank account) is the ultimate product.

The most excellent Horizons Unlimited website unquestionably being the exception, of course.

I rest my case M'lud.

__________________
Right Way Round ...

IMO in same cases, pictures make a post and in many cases, pictures can say 1000 s words

Bad move by photobucket, very bad, but what's worse is the way their action has decimated 3rd party sites such as this, overnight crippling any images in threads.

I've had a PB account for years for the sole purpose of hotliniking onto forums etc, am I going to pay? no, am I going to spend hours and hours going back through 50 odd forums and reloading all the photos? nope not at all, so who suffers? we'll anyone reading those forums, not PB and not the uploader

Some strange news guys.
It looks like my "FREE" Photobucket account is allowing me to post and 3rd part link pictures again.
I have not upgraded at all, so something is happening which I can't explain.