To date ... knock on wood ... I have never had an issue with being able to post an image link on a forum.
My Account on Photobucket is 4.59% full with 5,070 photos. As I mentioned on another post I only upload resized photos at 800 x 600 pixels which is what I post in the forum. The original photos are kept on my PC and backed up regularly on external drives.
A few years ago I upgraded my account type to a "Plus20" account which gives me a total of 22.3GB of storage. 2GB Initial + 20GB Plus20 + 0.3GB Reward storage. My 5,070 photos are using 1.0 GB of 22.3 GB (4.59%). Again, I only upload resized photos. Last year I paid $29.99 for one year for the Plus20 account ($2.50/month). But I'm not so sure that they still offer the Plus20 account since their options only appear to be Plus50 - $5.99/month, Plus 100 - $9.99/month, or Plus 500 - $39.99/month.
Since Photobucket works for me I will continue to use their service for IMG links in my postings and if I ever need to change to another service I have all the photos stored on external drives.
I'm sorry to hear that some of you are having problems with Photobucket and/or any other photo sharing applications. Hope you get things worked out.
My posts are still showing as the pic i posted.
Did you use the free amount of their host? Or have you paid. I paid for 3 years. Still i guess i gotta keep checking.
As I understand it, pay accounts prior to the policy change are good until the next renewal or December 31, 2018, whichever date comes first. Then you must either pay $40 a month or $399 a year to continue to use linking and the IMG function in boards.
So for now, you are grandfathered, but the big extortion scheme will catch up with you at some point.
I would be concerned with the life expectancy of Photobucket now. People are claiming to be leaving in droves (count me amount those) and deleting their accounts. Word was they had cash flow issues and ad revenues were no sufficient which is why they resorted to this insane scheme. Problem will be as the lower tier uses leave, many never to return based on principal alone, their per click ad revenue will continue to decline, and the spiral becomes self feeding. Their site has been taking longer and longer to load due to all the cookies and ad tracking crap they try to load already so the site was already getting flaky. So the question then becomes with the long term viability of PB being in question, will most people who might otherwise pony up $400 a year, now choose to do so, or go ahead and bite the bullet and move on to another service. Not me.....
In the end, I think they have committed corporate suicide and are not long for the world......
