As seen on the Photobucket webite What is 3rd Party Hosting? Photobucket defines 3rd party hosting as the action of embedding an image or photo onto another website. For example, using the <img> tag to embed or display a JPEG image from your Photobucket account on another website such as a forum, auction listings, blog, etc.* What users are affected by the changes to our 3rd Party Hosting policies? Moving forward, new and legacy free account users will NOT have third party hosting available. If you were a Plus Account subscriber in good standing as of June 1, 2017, you will continue to have all the privileges you have enjoyed including 3rd Party Hosting until December 31, 2018 as long as you maintain your subscription. Non Plus 500 Account subscribers that purchased after June 1, 2017 will not have access to 3rd Party Hosting. Pay for play has arrived.
Just a word to the folks still using PB. (Please review the latest changes at Photobucket. - Photobucket)
I have used them (with a paid account for years), I will get use till Dec 18 I believe (from their PR) I will be gone before that. I have downloaded about 2K of my images from there already (they are not my ONLY copy - as I have suspected for years that one day they will just go "poof") but it will be easier to upload them again already album'ed up this way. I will have migrated across to another provider before I have to.
Years ago I found PB to be slow, klutzy and just not user friendly. Switched first to Village Photos, which I liked a lot, but they died. Then I switched to Tiny Pic, and have no problem. I keep all my photos on my PC and on a couple backups. I only use TP for hosting pics to forums. If TP goes the way of FB, I haven't lost anything. Some forums are setting up their own hosting.
I remember when Photobucket first started. It's been going downhill for a long time. The first bad move was when they took free space from their original members. For those who want to add images to posts on forums, why not just attach them directly to the posts? Then, there is no worry of hosting issues later.
Have had no real success with anything in computers for long term storage and even less with the internet. Go back to the S100 buss and Sinclair Z*80's as my first computers and dial up modems using teletype like interconnections on a 286 type computer. Still think that for many purposes the last version of Dos is hard to beat. They keep coming up with new standards, floppy's from about 12 in sq to last standard, new formats of DVD's, operating systems change and old ones not compatible with new, companies, Artari, etc, go out of business and formats become obsolete, companies get bought out or collapse and everything stored on them disappear, all in all computers are a handy if unreliable tool. I can read and with a little effort understand a printed copy of the Geneva Bible dated about 1600, but my photo's from a 10 year old digital camera and my 10 old computer role playing games are unusable. Computers are a good tool and the storage is very convenient, but if SHTF, I would only stake my future on hard copies and redundant ones at that. If nothing else happens, you can have Frugal Squirrel events, or a new policy of requiring a paid membership, or paying a ransom fee, or losing it to a hacker, or the powers that be declaring it illegal or immoral, or a "hate" speech. Like everything else in life, use it, enjoy it, and remember that this too shall pass.
I still have my Atari 800XL and 65XE, and Commodore C64, but I'd hate to use them for online use. 64K memory? No. I'll keep my PC laptop, thanks. Not all forums have their own hosting ability. For those that do, I use it. TP is good for those that don't.
Most forums won't let you upload media. They don't want the bandwidth issues associated with hosting files and they don't want to store them either. Cheap bandwidth and cheap storage are beginning to change that but slowly.
Um cheap hosting and cheap bandwidth has been around for a long time. Forum owners are just too thrifty.