Bail out of Photobucket

[DerVVulfman]

I'm sure many in the community is aware of this by now.  And if you're not, you may wish to take action fairly soon.  Because as it stands, Photobucket is no longer a file-sharing site one can use for hot-linking images within the internet community, but merely a file storage and commercial sales site.

For our readers of the What's on your Mind topic, Bounty Hunter Lani found her existing Photobucket account locked because she hot-linked a fair number of images within other sites.  Until now, hot-linking was fully permitted by Photobucket, and was even encouraged as they had provided urls for direct links, emails and other embeds.  That has now changed.

New terms have come into play and Photobucket now 'encourages' its users to pay an unseemly $399 annual fee to allow one to use their hot-linking service.  Thousands of accounts are now affected and all of their links are broken.  While their accounts still retain their files, they can do nothing but see an image telling its customers that they used them too much for 3rd party hosting.  Even those using Amazon, eBay and Etsy have been affected, finding their product's images now replaced with a gray and white Photobucket warning.

Many have found this sudden $400 fee unacceptable, seeing it as a ransom.  

Don't believe me?  Check out the reviews at :

Needless to say, users of Photobucket may be looking to find other sites to use for their image filesharing services.

[MetalRenard]

Ridiculous. No business sense, this is quite literally business suicide.

[LunarBerry]

I've just discovered this myself today :( it's gotten so bad on advertisements that I can barely get through the process of browsing or uploading stuff. I've plans on deleting images after making sure I got a copy of the needed ones and deactivating my account with them.

[Siletrea]

I personally use http://sta.sh/

sta.sh is great! its free with any Deviantart account and is uber simple to store and share your files

[XP Kobold]

I got an email myself from photobucket about the hotlinking. fortunately from what i was told from their service who fixed an issue i had with photobucket. they lock you out if you exceed the 2GB free storage limit. (Basically cleared out my photos and things from there before deleting my account later on this month.) Though there's got to be other alternatives to put photos now that photobucket shot themselves in the foot.

[DerVVulfman]

I'm switching to Imgur. I just listed it in the Filesharing and Online Backup topic in our Tech Talk board. Any others found may be added to the thread (one 'decorative site-advertising' post per service).