First, I'd like to thank Photobucket for hosting my images for a more than 10 years. Second, I've only used Photobucket and they've been a reliable asset. Third, my opinion of them has changed after they've suddenly changed their Terms of Use this past June 28. They no longer host images to third party unless the customer pays $400 annually -- which feels like a ransom. It will take a lot of time for me to rebuild my websites by re-linking every image I've posted in the last 12 years. This affected 95% of my websites except for those few located in Blogdrive. I've decided to re-link the ~ef fan page first because this place is my primary blog space.

I tell you, it almost felt like my life was sucked out when Photobucket replaced all of my images with their watermark and I had to completely shut off every blog I have. They're more than 200 sprawled across the Internet. I only discovered it two days after their TOS changed. They could've at least warned their customer or gave proper notice before changing everything so that everyone could decide what to do. But no. And just when I've been leaning toward a paid subscription, with their ridiculous $400/yr, I'm no longer sticking to Photobucket. I'm going to have to salvage every image I've used and go to another cloud server. I'll be willing to pay for my account as well. If Photobucket could offer something like $9/mo and allow third party linking, then I'd gladly stick with them.

If you notice that parts of the site have that Photobucket watermark or if you can't access some parts of the ~ef fansite, that's because I'm still working on restoring the links so they'll remain closed. For now. Lesson learned.

Labels: blogs