Photobucket to charge $400 a year from July 1

[ServerKing]

From IT mag The Register:-


"Photobucket is cracking down on people embedding on third-party websites images it hosts, until now, for free.

The photo-slinging internet elder now says that anyone who wants to use its service to display photos it hosts on other pages – such as signature banners in forum posts – will now need to open up their wallets and plop down $399.99 a year for a subscription plan.

The new policy will be particularly annoying to longtime users who have relied on Photobucket's 14-year-old service to host the images they use to place images on forums or in blog posts.

Cheaper plans, including the free account option, will no longer have an option to allow third-party hosting. On the one hand, it's reasonable for Photobucket to ask for some help in footing its bandwidth bills for serving up images for folks on other websites; on the other hand, it will break a lot of graphics posted on the 'net and inlined in forums and blogs.

"Photobucket defines 3rd-party hosting as the action of embedding an image or photo onto another website," the updated T&Cs read.

"For example, using the <img> tag to embed or display a JPEG image from your Photobucket account on another website such as a forum, Etsy, eBay auction listings, a blog, etc, is definitively 3rd-party hosting."

To cut a long story short, if you post images here from Photobucket, it's time to find another hosting site. ImgBB is free for anyone looking to ditch Photobucket, unless there's £240 down the back of the sofa...

[RM5chris]

yep my images here are gone in my sig/profile.....will have to look for something else

[RM5chris]

Not being 'techy' at all, what are others doing to get nice sharp images to display?

[COBO]

This is a really bad idea. People will just close there accounts and just transfer there photos to free rival sites in droves.

Flickr

[YY13VKP]

Jul 3, 2017 18:15:25 GMT RM5chris said:

Not being 'techy' at all, what are others doing to get nice sharp images to display?

Flickr's a good place to go, I see you already have it, so maybe you can use a picture from there. 

[M1199]

Jul 3, 2017 18:15:25 GMT RM5chris said:

Not being 'techy' at all, what are others doing to get nice sharp images to display?

I took Serverkings advice and used ImgBB, my avatar uploaded pretty sharp, just need to sort out my signature now!

[Nathan]

Erm...Imgur?

[vjaska]

I think I just uploaded mine straight from my PC.

[astock5000]

I think I uploaded my avatar here directly to the forum, but I have images on other forums that are hosted on Photobucket (oddly they still appear to be working, and that is the case with some other people's images too). I'm still trying to decide which site is best to use from now on. Many of the images I have on Photobucket are not proper photos - just avatars, signature images, etc - so Flickr doesn't seem appropriate, while Imgur's terms of service doesn't allow hotlinking. When I mentioned this issue elsewhere several people suggested TinyPic, however that site is in fact owned by Photobucket and if this new business model continues to backfire and they eventually have to close then TinyPic could be affected as well. In any case I'd rather not use a site which is run by them.