UPDATE July 3: Photobucket keeps sending me autoresponses and demands for payment, so that's no help. BUT, I did find a viable workaround for myself, so I've posted what I'm doing right now at the end.
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The pirate's sign that you must
pay the ransom or forfeit your photos |
A few days ago, without any advance warning,
Photobucket sneakily changed its terms of service to disallow third-party hosting, or
hotlinking, on nearly all of its plan tiers. Most people use Photobucket explicitly
for the ability to link from images on Photobucket to other locations such as blogs and forums, so this seems like a baffling move.
Until you realize the scam that's afoot:
The only way to get your images to show up again is to pay Photobucket $400, upfront, as an annual subscription to its most expensive plan.
Ah, I see. It's a
ransom demand.
I'm livid. I'd been using Photobucket to host my images on my Blogger blogs for ten years. For several of those years, I paid Photobucket an annual subscription for the benefits of unlimited bandwidth and extra storage.