Based on checking a few threads, my photos seem to be still up (*knocks on woods*), but I guess it's probably only a matter of time until the hammer is dropped on all users with free accounts.
Whatever reasoning they got behind this decision (my first guess would be good ol' greed), it's still baffling they assume enough people would happily start forking out the money to re-enable 3rd party hosting, with so many free-to-use image hosting options available nowadays, with most (if not all...) with far superior UI and faster user experience. With the current state of their site, I wouldn't be surprised if the great majority of their userbase comprised of people who've had their accounts for quite a while and have used PB as their main picture hosting service, and haven't changed to something better because they got all their eggs in one basket. I can personally say I'm firmly in that group, having registered my account way back in 2004.
And I don't for a second believe
anyone is using Photobucket for anything else other than hosting pictures to show on other platforms. Even though they've seemed to have put some effort into making PB more into a moer of a 'social media' type image sharing community (and this newest change in their terms of use seems to reinforce that notion), the site is simply just way too obnoxiously sluggish and cumbersome to use for anything else than logging in, uploading your photos, and getting those IMG tagged links for posting on other places. It's not exactly a place you want to spend time on just browsing around.
Now getting a new account at some other hosting service would be a non-issue in itself, and practically nothing I have uploaded on PB are the only copies, but just suddenly losing the linking of hundreds of photos is something else. And in the case of Kitmaker Network posts, I'm not even sure if those could be fixed since you can't edit posts after 15~20 minutes after submitting them.
Associate Editor
2017-07-01_0-55-27 by Chris WIlson, on Flickr
