The death of Photobucket

[dorchadas]

Yesterday the internet was full of the news that Photobucket had decided to start charging $400 a year for the privilege of third-party linking, breaking millions of photo links all across the internet and devastating the blogging and forum communities. I post a lot of pictures with all my food and video game posts, and they're all hosted on Photobucket. The pictures still work, for the moment, but I'm not taking any chances.

So now I have to go through my posts and correct hundreds of photo links and point them to the new hosting site I transferred everything to. I already fixed my Japan tag, mostly so that my Japan vacation blogstorm would be in order, and I'm working now on the anime conventions tag. Doing video games or food will...take a lot longer, though fortunately my photo captions transferred over so if I do wake up to a bunch of dead links, I'll be able to reconstruct everything pretty easily.

And I was actually paying for a Photobucket plan, too, because I had so many pictures there! Oh well.

Comments

[cocosmileyboo]

I heard about this a couple days ago. I stopped using Photobucket awhile back, so I'm not hit as hard... but I'm still disappointed. I've a funny feeling they're not going to last too much longer.

[dorchadas]

Yeah, I can't imagine this is anything but a futile attempt to squeeze more blood from a stone before the bankruptcy hits.

[tilmon]

Oh jeez. I guess I better take a look at what I have there. $400 a year? They have to be out of their minds!

[dorchadas]

I know! Who do they think is going to pay that? Certainly not me.

[tilmon]

Whoo-boy! It was a struggle to download what I have there, but I finally got it. That experience reminded me of why I stopped using Photobucket to host pictures and why I was so happy when I could host my pictures at LJ. Ugh. I still haven't moved pictures from LJ. I at least need to back them up somewhere trustworthy, but I can't decide where. Any service at any time can be bought by anyone. 

[dorchadas]

Any service at any time can be bought by anyone.

Yeah...

I picked SmugMug because they're pay-only, so I figure they have a better long-term business plan, and because there was an easy importer tool that maintained my album structure and photo titles. But there's no guarantee anywhere is safe.

[alwaysbeenasmiler]

And photobucket used to be such a good service too! :( Well most of my photobucket pictures are tied in with icon communities that I no longer post to (and I have all of them saved on my computer) so I guess what will be will be.

Damn that capitalism!