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If like me Photobucket (I won’t even link to the trash) has shafted you by deciding to effectively take ownership of your photographs and content – and break who knows how many of your internet links, whether they be on social media, blogs, albums from yesteryear – we are running out of time until their next shafting!

It is a long story behind this saga but it can basically be summed up as follows – of course this is just my opinion – but here goes…

The Photobucket Story So Far:

1.  Photobucket Got Greedy.
2. Photobucket froze millions of users out of their accounts – then decided to charge extortionate prices to let people back in.  In the region of $400 a year to be a Premium member!  Or if you didn’t want to be Premium you could pay $99 / year to be ‘allowed’ to link to your own photos elsewhere – such as on this blog!  The result was the internet became flooded with this image :

   

3. The internet obviously reacted with fury as billions of images had just been effectively deleted.  Well established forums lost years of valuable photos and posts – imagine a Tutorial on a car site with no photos – that is the reality!  Only that car site with the tutorial – was actually millions of sites and millions of tutorials, threads, content that could never be replaced.  Original Posters (OPs) abandoned threads, abandoned writing content, it was a disaster for many really decent sites – all Photobuckets fault.
4. Photobucket reacted – they allowed the ‘hotlinking’ of images again – and the internet got its content back – but honestly the damage was done.  There was a caveat though – the images were only back temporarily.  The Photobucket fat cats decided to give users a ‘grace period’ to get their accounts in order and more importantly pay up!

   

5. If you didn’t pay up you went to a free account – which they claim to be approximately 250 images.

To be fair – at those prices I would have paid.  But the disgraceful, underhanded behaviour displayed by Photobucket means I never will!

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