Screwed Up By Photobucket

Several years ago Photobucket changed their policy of linking to images stored on their site.  They demanded payment at some ridiculous level to continue linking to my photos on their site.  OK, it is their site and I know providing networks, servers, and storage for all those images takes money.  I stopped adding photos on Photobucket but maintained what I had on the site.  For the most part the links continued to work.  Not long ago I got an email stating they changed their policy again.  I had too many images stored on their site to qualify for a free subscription.

Fortunately, I never used Photobucket (or any other site) for my primary storage of photos.  I maintain my own local storage and at least two backups of all images.  The online sites are mostly for convenience of being able to show others my photos and linking to pages such as this.

I got fed up with Photobucket and deleted my account and all images on their site.  I had forgotten I used their site for images on this blog.  Other than more recent posts all my images here are now broken links.  I have all the original photos.  I just need to figure out what photo went to what post.  I will try to fix those over the next few months.

Just goes to show don't trust any third party storage service.  Be it for photos, music, files or what ever.  This is especially true if using a "free" site.  I don't trust my paid sites either. They could change policy or just go out of business at any time.  Always maintain your photos somewhere where you have control.