Photobucket

I am a longtime (7+ years) user of Photobucket, but over the last few years this site has become so terminally ILL and dysfunctional that it has literally DIED when it comes to doing what we expect from it. It's now only a mere STINKING ROTTEN CORPSE waiting to be consumed by MAGGOTS! Yes, it still does a good job of uploading PICs from my PC onto its servers, but after that, it is all downhill to the level of pure TORTURE trying to use it. Every click seems to trigger an avalanche of Ads activity - bars, fames pop overs. Enter the world of WAITING FOREVER before anything productive can happen. It even tries ti install an APP now every time I login, and that APP would no doubt leverage even more ads and revenue generating snooping and data mining onto my system.
I load a PIC that's right side up on my PC and it arrives there upside down. How long does it take to fix forever. Why? Because orientation can only be fixed in the editor and even though the editor APP will load, IT WILL NOT load even one single PICs to edit/fix. So what if PIC arrives there & needs no editing, and you just need to get the sharing LINK copied. How many clicks in the "Get Links" frame does that take? You never know - 5, 10, 25 100... maybe never.
Only way I can get a share link is the load the slide show app (which DOES work well) and pause it on PIC in need a link for, then RT-Click to capture needed link. This site has become a filthy & degenerating ad scum infested location on the web to have to use, and the only time I feel good about it is when I CLOSE THE TAB it was crawling in. Then, I need to take a shower!
I am GONE as soon as i find another site with a migration tool for my library.

They shut all of my images on my website without any notification. Not an email or nothing, I was not given the opportunity to even ponder their blackmail demands of upgrading my service and paying them $400.00 per year for off-site image hosting. They replaced all of my website images with their reminder to contact them and pay up if I wanted to continue using their service. Upon seeing the having they caused on my own site I decided immediately that I would not cave in to this blackmail manuver by them. I immediately went to their site and fought their ads to retrieve all my images. This process was tedious and took over a full 24 hour day to accomplish. I finally got all of my images retrieved and in a folder on my computer. I went to another image site that I also had images stored on, www.postimge.org and uploaded my images that were previously on Photobucket. The image site at www.postimage.org does not have a single ad on their site and the site is very guick to navigate. It did not take a great deal of time to upload my images.
I then undertook to the process of reconstructing my website and modifying the code on my website pages to reflect the new location of the images. This was the most lengthy part of the whole process which I just finished. I now have to FTP upload the revised pages to my website hosts server, this can be done in a matter of minutes. I was not going to hold still for their thug like tactics and be blackmailed into giving them $400.00. My website is non profit with absolutely no popup ads or advertising of any sort of it. I have always borne the cost of the website out of my own pocket and have never profited in any manner or received a single cent for anything connected with my site as long as I have had the website in operation for a period of many years.
I refused to be intimidated by these thuggish tactics by the people at Photo bucket and did what was necessary and took the bull by the horn with my own hands. I venture their little ploy is going to cost them a lot more money just from users fleeing their service that they thought they were going to make.

I've had an account with Photobucket since around 2004 or so. It was free back then, which I really appreciated, but then around 2007 or so, they started cutting the file size limit and bandwidth limit for free accounts. Wasn't happy about that, but it still suited my purposes. About 5 years ago, they started covering your images with a watermark.

In the past year or so, I've been getting emails from them warning me that my account is over limit and I need to log in and delete my photos (or however they worded it) or get a paid account. The last time they sent this email, I logged in and deleted a lot of photos from my account (after downloading/backing them up), but not quite enough to get me into the free account tier. I'm a small business owner and I don't usually get enough time during the day to do things like this as often as I'd like.

Today I received an email from them with the subject "Your photos may be subject to deletion. Verify & secure your account today." The email told me I hadn't accessed my account in some time (really it's only been a couple of months or so?), and I must verify my account to keep it in "active" status. I clicked on the "verify" link, logged in, and ended up at this page with an ugly red background, informing me "Hosting is not allowed. It's time to make a decision, upgrade today or delete your account." There is a "Purchase now" link and underneath it a "or contact support to delete your account."

I think it's disgusting that they're not even giving me an opportunity to access my account so I can save/download/delete any other photos. They might try to justify it as, "Well, we told you many times and we're not giving you any more chances." But I only received two such emails telling me to delete photos or purchase an upgrade. And they never said anything about only giving you x amount of chances before forcing you to upgrade or delete your account. I believe they're not only greedy, but shady as well.

I left them negative feedback on their site along with an email address to contact me, so we'll see if they say anything. At this point I'd rather just delete my account and be done with them... they disgust me that much. I also can't afford a paid account with them. I've been using a better image hosting service for several years now (a FREE one). But I'd like to at least be able to access the photos first. They don't care, though.

PHOTOBUCKET ist SKANDALÖS SCHLECHT! THE WORST PHOTO SERVICE EXPIERENCE EVER WORLDWIDE! Am Anfang hiess es Bilder loaden ist gratis und deren Nutzung ist unbeschränkt. Deswegen war die Überflutung mit Werbung knapp tolerierbar. Von einem Tag auf den anderen plötzlich sind alle auf anderen Internet Seiten gebrauchte eigene Photobucket Bilder BLOCKIERT und PHOTOBUCKET GIBT ULTIMATUM: 400 USD JÄHRLICHER GEBÜHR ODER BILDER WEITERHIN FÜR IMMER BLOCKIERT. Eine reine Schikane, eine Schande!