Photobucket Update: $400 To Restore Broken Links

P

Pepper-Head

Senior Member
I don't know if anybody uses or has used photobucket in the past, but here's an important update for you all.

Photobucket recently updated without warning, disallowing third party hosting ((which is basically what photobucket was built around)). Any images uploaded to photobucket and linked with an [ img] or <img> tag to any website besides photobucket itself will now display as an ugly image prompting you to upgrade your account to allow third party hosting.

Their new paid plans that support this are either a whopping $40 a month, or $400 for a year.
Read more about their change and upgrade here: http://photobucket.com/p500/ 

I don't know if this change will stick around for long, but if you use photobucket, look for another image hosting service!

 
Last edited by a moderator:
That explains a lot x'D God damn. They used to be my go-to years ago too, but then they made their site unuseable and ads were just everywhere. Guess they wanted to try and find a way to make it worse LOL

 
@kami I know what you mean :( For a while there, it was the most convenient for me to do mobile uploads, but always impossible to navigate on the desktop due to ads. It's only gotten worse. I honestly don't see how they thought this was a great move.

 
They've been going downhill for years, so I'm not surprised Lol 

I remember using photobucket for everything back when I played Neopets. That was before the site was rendered practically unusable by ads. 

That's fine, there are plenty of other free image hosting sites that are less ad-ridden.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Ouch! I recall this being the go to place for hosting pictures for MySpace back in the day. After it died down the service has just floundered and the company has been living off of ad revenue and now they seem to feel ransoms are in order.

 
Aw man that is too bad. Looks like I will have to switch then. And those prices are really high. $400 a year is crazy and a lot more than my full web host cost which holds two games. Guess I will need to add some image uploading functionality to my site or switch image providers then.

Thanks for letting us know. Probably would have been a while before I noticed on my own.

 
@Anoua No problem! I'm really glad that posting this helped someone (and confirmed that it wasn't just me having issues with their ads!)

I honestly don't know where they pulled $40 a month/ $400 a year from. If they're trying to appeal to businesses or what, since that price is NOT obtainable by the mass of their users when they could very easily move to a free site.

 
I'd encourage anyone who owns their own server to use FTP to upload to a folder on their site. I've been doing it for years, and have screenshots etc dating back to 2004.

 
Ugh, great. I use Photobucket almost daily to host quick WIPs for clients and just today shut down my ability to use them 3rd party. Looks like Dropbox doesn't work for image hosting, anyone have any recommendations? I've used Photobucket only for maybe 10 years now. >:(

 
Bingo said:
Ugh, great. I use Photobucket almost daily to host quick WIPs for clients and just today shut down my ability to use them 3rd party. Looks like Dropbox doesn't work for image hosting, anyone have any recommendations? I've used Photobucket only for maybe 10 years now. >:(
Click to expand...
Imgur is basically my go-to now. I've also used tinypic as well, but Imgur is much more organized and nicer to use.

 
Bingo said:
I'll check out Imgur, thanks for the suggestion! It seems Stash on DeviantArt works too. 
Click to expand...
Sure thing! :D  Stash is nice if you don't upload much, clean out often, or have premium. 2GB fills up pretty fast XD  (Least it does for me, haha.)

 
kami said:
Sure thing! :D  Stash is nice if you don't upload much, clean out often, or have premium. 2GB fills up pretty fast XD  (Least it does for me, haha.)
Click to expand...
Good point, for me at least I post WIPs and keep them up a few days then delete, so Stash might work for me considering I don't keep much up. I'm still going to consider Imgur and others though if it doesnt work out :P

 
google drive is another good one to use as well. With the combination of imgur, google drive, st.ash, tumblr, and others, it should be fairly easy to keep a lot of things up online. I also use discord and dropbox as well.

 
My friend and I are already switching to somewhere else. It's going to be a pain to modify all the websites and everything but $400 is way too out of our budgets x__x

 
I recall having two accounts in it, and I have to say I haven't used either in years, but I still have my stuff uploaded there.

It's a choice that I find to be a "shooting your own foot" type of thing, but then again there are so many similar services nowadays that I don't think it would be too terribly inconvenient to migrate to another service.

 
Wow, this is horrendous. I used to use photobucket back in the day, now just use my own host if need be. They're dead in the water now with those prices especially.

 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top