Photobucket

I'm part of a really great forum started by a kind and selfless individual for Motorcycle enthusiasts. For quite literally years and years members have been uploading information for the benefit of all members and visitors with pictures linked primarily to photobucket alone. Sadly most of the thousands of articles on this forum are now of little value without the pictures that helped explain and guide people through the detailed repairs or modifications being shared.

I hope they pay for betraying the trust of thousands of people, as instantly and without warning as they have done. They have not only broken the links to the photos but held them for ransom. I hope they completely self-destruct unless they find a better solution than blackmail.

I believe sites like these are not exactly obligated to maintain the links they provide to support photos out there on the net, not unless it's in the member contract etc which I doubt you'll find they ever do. So that means any one of the other pic upload & store sites can pull the slime job that photobucket did. One way to protect yourself from the impact of that might be to split your pics up to multiple hosting sites if you're often linking them in various places.

I cannot begin to express my displeasure and disappointment with how far Photobucket has fallen. I used to recommend it to all my friends and family, because it was a great way to store photos and diagrams online. I could link directly to images, arrange them in convenient folders, etc. Now the site is so infested with ads and popups that are capable of defeating popup blockers and ad blockers that it's virtually useless. Half the time it refuses to load an image, and the rest of the time it hogs up a huge amount of my computer's resources. Most of the time when the image does load, it's not on for more than a few seconds before a screen-filling ad screaming about "WHAT DOCTORS DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW!" will pop up and refuse to go away even after I click the "X", mainly because my computer was so bogged down with whatever scripts they run that it wasn't able to get rid of it for a few seconds. For some reason they no longer allow you to link directly to the image. You are always pulled to the main hosting page, probably so you can see all the "wonderful" ads. The site is so troublesome that I've given up on it ever getting better. I've moved to Imgur and it was one of the best decisions of my life.

A great website for sharing (or storing) photos.

This site even helped me out as I was trying to send images to my (FORMER) car insurance company after an accident but they "could not accept attachments over 1 MB". (Why did they ASK me to send pictures then?!) I simply uploaded the images (simple, easy, and FREE) to Photobucket.Com, then pasted the url's into an email to the crappy FORMER car insurance company and "magically" the insurance company had the images.

Handy place to store images you use often for emails, websites, blogging, etc.
Go get an account now. It's worth it.

Suddenly eradicates free accounts then cheerfully demands payment to reactivate... holding photos hostage is a dirty trick.

I've done hundreds of business transactions since 1996 for online internet products and services and I will state, beyond a shadow of doubt, Photobucket is the worst business I have ever dealt with. I purchased a yearly paid membership to get rid of the infestation of advertisements that displayed on the "free" version. Then I uploaded photos to share with friends and family, only to find out that now that they were being bombarded with advertisements unless they too purchased a membership! Less than 24 hours after purchasing the membership, I contacted Photobucket to cancel my membership and they said "Nope. Can't do it. You're on the hook for the full year, and THEN we will downgrade your membership back to the "free" membership". Well guess what? A year later and I found they auto-charged my PayPal account again for another year! And when I tried to cancel it, I got pretty much the same message! I have had to put a stop to future payments via my PayPal account, not my Photo-$#*!-it account as I don't trust them. Absolutely crooked and moralless company that should be shut down.

Photobucket is getting greedier and sleazier year by year. My paid account used to include "ad-free" but then I was getting ads saying "pay $1 more for no more ads!" Instead of getting an email reminding me to update my credit card info, my account reverted to a free account and many of my high res images were never restored.

And then this time, I was told I needed to update my credit card info (could have sworn I wasn't supposed to pay again until August but whatever) and there was no way to do it. "Customer service" never responded and then I was locked out of my account and told I needed to upgrade, even though I don't need more storage space! So I paid literally more than double what I paid before to access my account again. They raise the price of their paid accounts so you have no choice but to upgrade if you want access to your photos. From now on, I'm storing my photos on an external hard drive and I'll find another online company. I've tolerated BS from them for years and I'm finally done with them.

I used photobucket for 10 years. In that time, their website became increasingly bloated, hard to use, slower, and finally littered with popups and ads. I don't know how many times their site went down for a half day or a full day so I could not get to my photos. That was all shoddy enough, but it was free, so I put up with it.

The recent hijack where they suddenly want $400 for a service that wasn't worth $10 is outrageous. They know there are millions of links to their photo files all over the web, so they think they can overcharge for a poor service just because people won't want to lose those links.

Well, I don't use a lot of different forums. I only participate in one. So although it took me a few days, I pulled all my photos, put them on my own website, and moved all my forum links.

If I were looking for a photo hosting site now, there is no way I would ever use Photobucket because their service is terrible to begin with and now they want $400/yr for 3rd-party linking. Are you kidding me? I can pay $100/yr for full web hosting - and then it's my own website, my own storage, no ads, no bandwidth restrictions, and no unexpected "ransom" payments.

If you are looking to host photos, it's fine to pay for the service. But find another service. Don't consider using Photobucket. They are far too incompetent.

PhotoBucket used to be a viable option for Internet users to get their images hosted somewhere for the purpose of linking them between different forums and online communities. Not only this, but they were an easy-to-use way to store photos and share them with friends and family. The company which has acquired the website over the years has decided that their lacking attempts to monetize the platform are not performing as well as they need and have blackmailed the entirety of their user base to pay $400 each year to continue doing what they have always been doing.

This wouldn't be much of an issue if it weren't for the simple fact that competing services are 99.9% cheaper than this. They are screwing over longstanding users of an already waning platform by essentially holding hostage billions of images found online and forcing people to pay to continue to have those seen online. Alternatives are insanely cheap and potentially free depending on what online services users already use. Some online storage services offer this as a free perk while others have some benefits available that are insanely cheap compared to Photobucket's hilariously off prices. No market research was done to make this decision; it shows.

This website and the services provided are not being managed by the same people that put in all of the effort to gain the good will of the community. It has been acquired at least twice that I know of, and therefore the service is no longer anywhere near what it used to be.

Contacted them about it the day it happened but they only got to me a day later saying they can't refund because it took longer than two days for me to contact them (which it didn't because I contacted them on the 26th) and I understand if this was because I didn't like photobucket but I requested a refund because THEY MADE A MISTAKE AND CHARGED ME TWICE FOR THE MONTHLY MEMBERSHIP. So basically they stole money from me and I won't be getting it back. $#*! these people

Once they have your info... good luck to you!

If you decide to start a subscription, plan on spending your days trying to stop it. I first contacted the company Photobucket and requested a cancellation which was no big deal, wait for it, they keep charging your card. So I contact them and tell them they are still charging the card and I request they stop processing the charges since I canceled. The only problem is they "cannot locate my account" as it was canceled. Not through email or though name so they say I can't be charged because there is no account in their records., This continues for several months. I then contact the Credit Card company who says I need to take it up with Photobucket. After explaining their story that the account doesn't exist, the credit card company credits me back the charges, makes a notation in my account showing Photobucket is making unauthorized charges, and issues me a new card number. Guess what happens the following month... yup, Photobucket charges the new card AND IT IS FOR AN INCREASED AMOUNT. What a freaking scam. The credit card company says to contact Master Card for a "merchant lock". After an hour on the phone, Master Card tells me they don't do merchant locks and I need to contact my credit card company. I'm not sure if I will ever get away from the Photobucket scam short of closing my account with Master Card, but I do know for every minute spent trying to stop the ongoing charges, I will match with minutes spreading the word about the Sham of a company called Photobucket.

I used to take pictures of Cannabis buds and post them on my photobucket to share with friends and on one forum. I started doing this in around 2009. I had around 100 photos in my "budshots" album by 2016. Photobucket changed their terms of service without notifying anyone and now my photos are considered "objectionable content". I didn't have these backed up anywhere else because I thought they were safe on my photobucket. They say if I want them back I have to get a member of law enforcement to contact them. I told them that they were being petty and that it is a waste of law enforcement time and that they should just let me download all my photos and delete the album from their site. They wouldn't have it and say I need to contact a member of law enforcement for a court subpoena.

Their TOS doesn't define what is deemed "objectionable content" so after 6+ years of hosting my photos someone decided that they are against the TOS but the only response I get when trying to retrieve them is that they are "objectionable content". I told them what is deemed objectionable content is a matter of personal belief and opinion, and i can still find thousands of other cannabis photos on their site.

I just want my photos back and I will never use this horrible site. It's terribly slow and full of ads compared to when I made the account to.

Photobucket.com steals valuable names and abuses them to tag unknown photobucket.com uploaded photos of unknown people. Why photobucket.com minor search engine tags thousands of photobucket.com domain hosted images with random legal names of valuable people I do not understand. Photobucket.com should give 404 HTTP Status Code to bing.com search engine. Photobucket.com violates legal rights. Sites similar to photobucket.com is not supposed to be indexed by bing.com or google.com search engines. Photobucket.com is not a site to manage what it is doing. photobucket.com is harming legal rights, unfortunately their support team is illegitimate to understand how photobucket.com harms legal rights. Internet is a big business, photobucket.com supposed to care internet copyright law. Photobucket.com does internet activity that its support team can not solve the problems. Photobucket.com should not be visible on internet, since they do not know to solve public URL problems. That thousands of photobucket.com photos are tagged by my legal name is not legal, violates internet law. I do not believe that photobucket.com users noticed that photobucket.com images, photos are randomly tagged by different names. Internet law is nothing to photobucket.com.