For several years, I’ve been storing my photos on Photobucket.com. I never paid for it so I was willing to deal with the endless pop up ads every time I wanted to upload some of my photos for my blog. All was well until a few days ago when I noticed that the photos in my blog postings were being blocked. Apparently, Photobucket changed their user agreement and they will no longer support third-party hosting of any of the photos in their site. The only way to get the photos back is to pay a monthly subscription fee. Fat chance of that.
I was using Flickr several years before I switched to Photobucket because I ran out of free space. So, the very early blog posts should be fine for now until Flickr does the same thing. I liked Photobucket because even though I had 300 pictures stored on their site, I was only using 3% of free space on my account. Now I’m in a pickle. I assume I could download all my Photobucket photos onto a hard drive and import them back into blog posts, but that is a lot of work.
I noticed a few months ago that WordPress wouldn’t allow me to cut and paste directly from Photobucket onto my blog page. I had to start loading the image onto WordPress first. Now I know why, which is why my most recent posts are fine. The last working post is from four months ago when I smashed my finger. Every post after that until three years ago is blocked.
Thank God I don’t do this for a living! What a nightmare this must be for professional bloggers who blog two or three times a day. I read on Reddit about people who are in dire straits because of this.
I was going to start using Imgur.com for storing my photos, but I read they have issues too with spyware. I guess I’ll have to buy an external hard drive and store my photos on that so this never happens again. However, once I run out of storage on WordPress’ site, I’ll either have to pay for it, or shut my blog down.
MVFlaim Furnituremaker 
Sorry to hear that. But being a professional freelance photographer I would have to ask why you would even think of letting some free party like photo bucket have primary storage of your files? You should always maintain complete control of those images on external hard drives under your control. And they should be watermarked or imprinted to prevent as much as possible theft if you use these images for your work. And if you’re really serious about images and document protection, set up a RAID to auto backup your data to a separate hard drive.
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All very valid points. I’m anything but a serious blogger. I mainly do this for kicks and giggles. In the back of my mind I kind of knew this would happen some day, but since I don’t make a nickel from this blog, I decided to take the chance. In other words, I’m lazy. Photobucket was just too easy to upload pictures from my phone and copy and paste onto my blog page.
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My empathy is with you. Losing your data is the pits. Win10 update just killed a valuable CAD software, and access to drawing files. Today I bought a refurbished machine with w7-pro to restore that program.My free upgrade to 10 cost nearly $300.
I always mentally fussed about stuff I wrote and sent to the ozone. When it gets detailed, there is always my word processor. Memory for data storage, on my computer, my backup disk(s), precludes using another, the ozone, storage sites. The only reason I use Photobucket was its position as host to a third party forum.
I have 100s of gigs of memory in empty partitions I don’t know about. At the cost of memory (HDD) I can’t fathom not having any.
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Apparently Photobucket wants $400 for user to share through a third party. Screw that.
I’ll have to go through my stats and find the most popular posts I’ve written about and restore those first. Most of the other I may just dump.
I liked looking back at some of my old posts to see how I built things. Sometimes I forgot how I did things and the photos helped jog my memory.
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I run several different AutoCad programs and a few other CAD programs for other things all on Win10. And while I maintain my current working drawings on my main computer, I do back them up from time to time on external hard drives just in case. Same for photos and documents or any other valuable data. External hard drives have come down in prices a lot. And it’s just not worth the hassle of losing your only copy of data in today’s cyber world. I have had my computer wiped clean twice to remove some really bad malware that either held it for ransom or flooded it with spam. And I do use good antivirus software all the time. Check your CAD maker and ask if they have updates for your programs. Recheck Windows and see if you are up to date there.
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It’s funny you mention that. My work computer seems to have been wiped clean today for some reason. I have to head to the plant tomorrow morning so it can be hooked up to their network. Never ends with me.
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I had the same thing happen to me, but luckily I have used Photobucket very little, so no big deal, but I know others are in the same situation as you. Sorry this happened.
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A friend of mine told me to use Google photos and put the app on my phone. Done.
Apparently this happened about a month ago, but I don’t pay that much attention to my blog. I’m not sure what I’ll do if I run out of storage space on WordPress. I may have to start paying for it, but that may not be a bad thing. I might be able to make the blog look more professional and get more followers. I just wish my computer skills didn’t suck so bad.
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For now, I’m just uploading images directly through WordPress. I’ve signed up for the “Personal Plan”, $35.88 a year, which isn’t bad. It gives me 6gb of storage, of which I’m currently using 1.8%, so it should be quite awhile before I run out of room.
But, yeah, what Photobucket did was just unforgivable.
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I’ll probably do the same. I’m a little curious to see what the paid service offers anyway.
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I hate this for you. I’ve seen several blogs complaining about the same situation.
External drives are your friend for photos and data storage. I upload the photos I need for the blog directly to WordPress and pay for the extra storage that is required. I think its $20 a year.
None of those fix your broken links, but something to look into for the further.
Maybe photobucket will get so much backlash from this move that they will restore the broken links and only charge for future 3rd party links.
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I installed Google Photos app on my phone and linked it to my computer so I’m fine going forward.
I think PhotoBucket pissed off so many people they may go under which means all the photos would probably be lost anyway.
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