Linked – Amazon and eBay images broken by Photobucket’s ‘ransom demand’
They let users embed images with free accounts for years, and then suddenly changed that policy…
“But the new policy has also affected historical social media posts, blogs and forums that were reliant on Photobucket.
One of those affected is Stampboards, a forum with more than 17,000 members who discuss postage stamps and share images of them.
Many of its pages are now filled with Photobucket’s upgrade demands instead of the photos of stamps it once showed.”
Ouch.
I’ve been waiting for the announcement of Flickr going away or doing something different as Yahoo! has gone the sale process. That would do the same thing to many, many blog posts and forum posts, including pretty much every post on my photo blog. I figure when it does, that’ll make for a nice chance to simply remove all the posts and start over. Seems a lot simpler than trying to upload 100s of photos to my server and update links on 100s of posts.
It is, however, the price we pay for hosting images elsewhere. Just like posting things to other social media platforms, things could change, and you could be stuck losing a lot.
At least make sure you have backups of your images in another location. You never know.
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