The photos displayed on this blog mostly come from a photo sharing site called Photobucket. I have used Photobucket for a decade and I even pay them for the privilege. I don’t abuse their storage capacity or bandwidth.
Photo sharing sites have three basic uses:
- To store your photos safely in the Cloud.
- To provide a means to link your stored photos back to the photo site from a blog post or forum.
- To actually embed your photo in another forum or blog post. This is called 3rd Party Hosting.
Like 75% of Photobucket’s customers I used it for option 3. But Photobucket didn’t make any money this way. They decided the best way to rid themselves of these troublesome clients was to extort money from them so they would pay or disappear. A month or so ago, they changed their Terms of Service without telling anyone via email or clearly in a notice on their site. All they did was make a cryptic post on their blog about it.
Then in early July they replaced millions of embedded photos in blogs, sites, forums and eBay with the above image.
Nice, eh? Looks like a Wannacry notice.
PB broke uncounted eBay auctions, blogs and websites. Unless you pay $400 per year you won’t be able to do 3rd Party hosting and get your photos back online. Unless you pay $100 per year you won’t even be able to link. Your account is useless. Get lost, Dude.
Now to be fair only free users got the roughest treatment. As a paid subscriber my hosting still works – and I get 18 months to ante up the $400 per year to continue what used to cost me $30. The value isn’t there, since I can simply host my own images here at 104vaughan.ca for no cost, no bandwidth nor capacity issues.
I thought I was helping Photobucket out – apparently not. So now I have 300 blog posts here I’ll have to edit one at a time to remove the Photobucket links and upload the graphics to my own site. You wanna believe I’ll be doing this.
Thanks a bunch, Photobucket -NOT!!!!
