Photobucket-hosted images will now cost you US$400 a year to share on third-party sites

 

If you’re one of the many users of the internet in the early 2000s, you were probably reliant on Photobucket. The image hosting service used to have free, ad-supported accounts that will let you share those images around the web. It was attractive to small retailers because of that feature. Now, though, the service seems to have “taken hostage” the images of its users as the service quietly changed its terms of service. The change has affected some images put up on shopping sites like Amazon, EBay, and Etsy, as well as many forums and blogs.

Photobucket is now asking its users to pay a US$399 annual fee for those who want to continue “third-party hosting” of the images uploaded on its service. On June 26^th, the company posted a brief note for its users to “take a moment to review our updated terms and policies.” Around 500 words into the linked document, there was the clause that free accounts would no longer allow sharing to third-party sites. And as is seen around the aforementioned services, Photobucket replaced the image-linked photos with an image that says the account needs to be updated.

Some users feel like their images are being held ransom by the service and refuse to pay the fee. Some have even started uploading their images to a rival service. Perhaps things would’ve gone down differently if Photobucket made proper announcements to its users.  What’s happening here now also is a reminder that there is still a price to pay for free services.

As Nigel Atherton, editor of Amateur Photographer magazine, tells BBC, “There's a lot of websites out there looking for advertising, and there's a finite amount of advertising spending to go round. And any photo gallery and storage site like this that relies on ads to offer a free service can only continue to do so if they have enough money coming in. So, if you put all your photos into any site or app like this where it's not clear how they are going to continue financing their business, then it could come back and bite you at some point in the future."