Photobucket changes policy

I have been hosting my blog images on Photobucket since I first started blogging 13 or 14 years ago. It has always allowed, without charge, what is called “third-party hosted images.” But they have now changed their policy. They have announced that anyone who wants to link to images must now pay an annual fee of $400. They call it their Plus 500 Plan.

Well, I sure ain’t going to pay such an exorbitant price. I understand why Photobucket wants to charge for the use of their bandwidth—I’ve always wondered how they stayed in business as a free service—but $400? Jeesh. They just priced me and a bunch of other people out of the market. Sounds to me like a company that is thinking about bankruptcy.

What that means is that when anyone checks out my previously-published articles, they will see place-holders where the images should be. Sorry about that, folks. I am going to download my Photobucket images so I won’t lose them, and I will start using my WordPress account to host new images for future articles; but I won’t be going through my old articles and uploading new images for them. That would take … well … perhaps not an eternity but at least an aeon or two.

And I have no intention of paying Photobucket’s ransom demand.