Well, I have done it! It has taken close to a year but I have finally transferred all my blog images to my own site and domain.
For several years I hosted my images with Photobucket and embedded them on my own blog and elsewhere on the Internet as needed. I did pay a nominal amount and was careful not to abuse the privilege. However, Photobucket decided to shaft its customers and charge them hundreds of dollars for the privilege of so-called 3rd party hosting and embedding. If you didn’t pay the extortion, your images eventually would look like this:
We paying customers got a bit of a reprieve until the end of 2018.
This was really annoying since I hosted a lot of my travel photos and all my blog posts would be messed up. I had no choice but to go through each post and one by one replace the PB link with one to my own domain. And 350 posts later I am finished.
I learned a valuable lesson about Internet real estate. Plus I learned never to trust any photo hosting site. As far as Photobucket goes – I am outta there and they can get stuffed!
Update: To be fair to Photobucket they have now eliminated the silly graphics (they put a watermark on your photos though) and they have announced more affordable options than $399 US per year. However, I don’t trust them any longer and it just makes more sense to control my own graphics.
