TechTheDay

Photobucket, an image hosting service running since 2003, has long been known to be at war with their users over hotlinking their images. That is, people sharing the images they store in Photobucket for other websites and forums. But now Photobucket users are angry over the new move Photobucket pulled on them.

A Four Hundred Dollar Picture

This week Photobucket suddenly decided that they will not allow free users to be able to hotlink their images to their websites anymore. From now on, they’re charging users $399 for hotlinking service that will only last for a year. This came as a surprise to all the users because many of them use the site free to host images for their websites and other things, like shopping or auction sites. It was Photobucket’s main appeal to users.

Photobucket mainly earns income via the ads users can see on their website. But it seems that’s not enough for them anymore and they had decided to change their policy.

So suddenly all free users are unable to make use of the images they saved in Photobucket. Websites like Amazon and Ebay were hit the most since a lot of the merchants in those sites were using Photobucket to host their images. Those images suddenly disappeared and were replaced by pictures saying their Photobucket accounts needed to be updated. Users claimed that there was no notice from Photobucket and some even started accusing them of holding their images for ransom. Many of them realized the change in policy only after when the change was implemented and the images they shared replaced. The image hosting website did post a blogpost about their update of their ToS. In the updated ToS they made it clear that the only way to be able to hotlink their images is to pay for a $399 plan. All the other plans below that doesn’t allow hotlinking. The $59.99 plan doesn’t even allow any image linking at all. Free account users could only use Photobucket as a kind of cloud storage with only a capacity of 2 GB. Compare that to Mega Limited that allows up to 50 GB of storage for free users.

User’s Reaction

Obviously those who relied on Photobucket being free weren’t happy. A lot of tech articles this past week have called it a corporate suicide, how the image hosting site is facing a backlash from its users. Some people took to twitter to express their anger at the sudden change of policies, calling them “greedy” or “disgusting.” Old forums, like Stampboards, have their administrator advocating to not pay for the $400 premium fee, calling it a “ransom”.

The Alternative to Photobucket

Of course if the users can’t use Photobucket then the only alternative is to find other options. One of these options is Imgur, which is very popular. Its an image sharing site, rather than just hosting. Users can upload the image and share them for free and there are no limits per user. There is, though, a limit of 50 uploads per hour. Another option being pointed at is Google Photos and if you already have a Google account then you’re all set to go. Finally there’s Flickr, which is also a free image hosting site. They also let their users upload videos that they can use for their blogs.

A lot of people are upset about sudden changes and hope that Photobucket might back off and go back to letting people hotlink for free. Unfortunately, if we take other free hosting sites that suddenly decided to charge their users, like Crunchyroll, then going back is less likely. In the end, its just business.