Photobucket is killing external image hosting
 

Just a heads up, as of last night Photobucket updated their Terms of Service and account tiering. It has broken down to under the new terms hotlinking of hosted images is forbidden (and they will break links as they come across them) and the Premium account which enables hotlinking has gone up to about $31 a month. The tech news outlets have been talking about it all day however for forums where users hosted all their images externally on Photobucket, get ready for a whole lotta broken images. I've been using them since day 1 on this forum and I'm about to watch almost 15 years of hosted images break.
If there is anything anybody has bookmarked that makes use of an image hosted on Photobucket I suggest you make a local copy of it now.

Photobucket really started sucking about a year ago, now I can claim they're the worst. Some notice of their planned changes would have been nice.

I use Flickr but have always kept local backups. Best to play it safe with digital photos.

I seen the info on ARF .I'm not surprised.The greed has now caught up to them.

For years, I used a web hosting site for email and eBay photo hosting. Events in 2012 led me to cancel the service, but now I'll probably go back, as it was only 3 bucks a month, far cheaper than most alternatives. No ads, no worries.

I've got tons of NOS parts and have been thinking of placing them all on a site (not a shopping cart kind of thing, just a way to catalog it all with photos) so that I can easily link to photos when someone is looking for something, without all the slow upload that PB had. I tried with my personal space that my internet provider gave me, but they got greedy years ago and wanted 9.99 a month for 500MB of storage.

For now, I'll probably go with Flickr or Imgur...

Gosh, that's crappy. I used Photobucket for most photos. Guess I'll have to start doing something else. One thing that drives me nuts on forums is trying to view an older thread and all of the pictures are deleted or have broken links. Guess that's about to happen a lot more often.

Imgur is free and easy to use. I use it here occasionally and all the time over on various SB Nation sites.

I liked Pootobucket because I was free to delete photos or go back to them as needed, whereas a lot of other hosts were just anonymous upload.

Also I noticed Photobucket had been slow to load lately and lots of ads and popups.

I probably use Flickr or Pinterest more and just let PB just sit aside.The rest will catch up sooner or later to get on the bandwagon to line their pockets with more loot from its subscribers.Thats whats happening with the cloud drives slimming down their freebie drive size and charge for the extras which used too be free.Sooner or later users will stop using all of them and they will close up shop because of their corrupt stupidity.

This sounds exactly like what ImageShack did a few years ago when they killed off their basic free service. What a PITA.

I just deleted my photobucket account. Had enough of their nonsense.

:mad: I've had a "free" Photobucket account for over 10 years with over 1000 pics linked to many web sites over that time. Have not heard a word about this from them, yet. Then again I have not received any promotional emails trying to sell me prints, mugs etc since April 14th either. Used to get an email from them almost every day trying to sell me something. Oh well. All those record album pictures in the "what are you listening to now" threads I posted on AK over the years will go away I suppose.

Oh man, Photobucket really kicked up a storm.
It seems we are starting to discover there's also a lot of hosted content that was being used in sites like Amazon or ebay and it's pissing everyone off that they now have to go back and rehost everything. It's gotten so big even the BBC has caught wind of it. Again, their light on it shows that everyone is not impressed. What were they thinking??

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40492668

All they had to do was "grandfather in" all the previously existing images and then charge for future hosting. That way they wouldn't have disrupted (destroyed) historical archiving already on the internet.

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Poor business move. I hope they go out of business over this BS after everybody left them.I dont feel sorry if they do.The morons that came up with this BS will have no problem finding another job somewhere else and screw their next employer with their BS ideas.I can see them going over to Youtube and have YT to start charging for linking videos everywhere.That will put YT out of business.