Do you use Photobucket for linking images?
 

Thousands of listings from online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay are now filled with unsightly error images by Photobucket after the photo hosting site quietly introduced a $399 annual fee to users who want to embed images on third party websites. Users are now accusing Photobucket of extortion, as the service failed to make the update to its terms of service abundantly clear.

It all began last week when Photobucket announced in a short blog post that it had updated its terms of service that had begun taking effect from June 20th. Nowhere in the blog post did Photobucket highlight the most important change, which was that it will now cost uploaders $400 a year to insert their photos on another website using direct image links.

Photobucket, which launched in 2003, was previously free for all users to upload and embed images all over the web. It was a popular image hosting service of choice for early 2000s bloggers (think Xanga and LiveJournal) until the likes of Facebook and Instagram came along. Since then, it remained widely used by small businesses selling items through online marketplaces, offering 2GB of storage for free or $100 a year for 102GB of storage (the most popular paid plan, according to the service). The update to Photobucket’s ToS, however, means users are forced to upgrade to the most premium tier if they wish to hotlink.

You can imagine, then, the outrage that ensued. It appears some users can’t even download their own photos out of their Photobucket accounts without upgrading.

Photobucket’s response so far has been a short acknowledgement on Twitter, with no apology to be seen.

If you use the "attachment option" within Ausjeep, this will ensure none of your images are ever lost on this site.

Learn how to use the attachment option on Ausjeep here >> http://www.ausjeepoffroad.com/forum/...d.php?t=104141

I tried using Photobucket once when I first joined Ausjeepoffroad but have always preferred using the attachment option on this forum :mrgreen:

From somewhere else:


Credit goes to the person who found the solution, just sharing the info so photos can be fixed/visible again if people have the time to fix the links in their posts

We would obviously hughly appreciate members updating their builds and technical posts where image links are broken, to ensure that these useful and often viewed thread stay live with image content, but we understand the time the patience it takes to do this.

Google Images
 

No way was I gunna pay $399 per year
So I've swapped over to Google images
Unlimited free storage for compressed images ;)

Denver-based Photobucket on Thursday said that a side business discovered by customers long ago is not sustainable. The company stuck to its new policy to charge up to $400 a year to people using Photobucket to host a large number of images.

“This path to a more sustainable business model allows us to develop an even more robust product to meet our customers’ needs,” Photobucket chief executive John Corpus said in a statement.

In late June, the company began charging $60 to $400 a year to customers who were using the site as essentially a hosting service. Users could store images on Photobucket and link to the images from message boards and other third-party websites. The service had previously been free and supported by ads.

But 75 percent of Photobucket’s costs originated from “non-paying users leveraging 3rd party hosting,” Corpus added. And it resulted in “zero revenue.”

As a business, the company turned the service into a paid feature and offered 500 gigabytes of storage and unlimited bandwidth for $399.99 per year, which allowed for “unlimited image linking and third-party hosting.” The cheaper $60-a-year plan allowed for 52 GB of storage but no third-party hosting.

The problem for affected users was that their photos disappeared online. They were replaced with images that asked the user to unlock their account because “3rd Party Hosting has been temporarily disabled.”

Customers accused Photobucket of blackmail and being forced to pay a ransom. One user who wrote to The Denver Post said that he’s used Photobucket for nine years and posted 9,800 photos.

Photobucket said it let those users either subscribe to the new plan or migrate the photos off the site.

But that’s not enough for long-time Ausjeep users for fourteen years.

One user says "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.

What I don't get is how they can effectively stop providing the previous service retrospectively, i.e. they kill all existing links (unless you upgrade). If they want to change their business model ongoing, i.e. from this point on you have a choice to use the paid service or not, then that's fair enough, but all previous hosting/linking should remain as is. Otherwise surely they are effectively breaking prior contracts (though I'm betting there will be some obscure fine print somewhere that says they can).

Regardless they have to expect a significantly reduced amount of traffic to their site by doing this. With other free hosting services around why would someone pay PB, especially when they've been such a###holes about it. Doesn't seem like good business planning to me.