Photobucket...

[Guinness]

can go straight to hell.

[snip]

imgur master race.

[Walter]

can go straight to hell.

Do not pass Go. Do not collect $399.99.

[Kaiser Kirk]

Heh on my To-Do list is to find an alternative to host

[1Big Rich]

can go straight to hell.

A lovely sentiment.

This article

https://www.buzzfeed.com/katienotopoulos/photobucket-just-killed-a-chunk-of-internet-history?utm_term=.khgWnBKB6j#.ej5wRyYyMm

has a nice piece on exactly what they have done to the web.   Specifically this line

But this change has also done something terrible for all of us, even people who never even had a Photobucket account: It's completely broken the internet. Vast swaths of blogs and personal websites from the mid-00s are now full of missing images, replaced with a hideous error message.

CanisD passed away last year.  Now his sites, which still exist, are all photobucket error messages instead of his fantastic, imaginative work with ship drawing.   And photobucket is holding his work hostage for a ransom that will never be paid.

I've deleted my photobucket account.

As for an alternative, I found this somewhat article:

https://www.lifewire.com/free-image-hosting-sites-3486329

recently edited; the title says 11 sites, but you'll see it only contains 10.  Photobucket has been edited out.  In any case, it proved a good starting point.

I chose to go with postimage.org; they seem to have a business model that allows for more permanence and no charging.  They prefer posting of a thumbnail on a third-party site that will lead users to the full-sized image on their site, below which there is some advertising.  Since the advertisers are the revenue stream, it makes more sense to me that they won't be charging.

Another alternative I've recently become aware of is PictureTrail

https://www.picturetrail.com/

Hope this helps.

Regards,

[Walter]

CanisD passed away last year.  Now his sites, which still exist, are all photobucket error messages instead of his fantastic, imaginative work with ship drawing.   And photobucket is holding his work hostage for a ransom that will never be paid.

I do not understand what kind of idiot thinks that it is a good idea to also remove the option to view images on photobucket itself. That makes it even more worthless than it already was.

I did notice that I could access Canis' images using the edit option and then with right-click "view image" after which I could save the images.



... but doing that with all his images is quite a big job... and you need to copy/paste the name of the image every time as well as it uses the same generic edit image name for every image.

[Guinness]

I took 90 minutes and moved all my stuff to an AWS S3 bucket. It should cost me about $0.50/month, but at least I now have some element of control. I've also (briefly) looked into OneDrive, but the S3 solution was just easier for me to get what I wanted. Of course, I'm a little bit of an expert at the whole cloud infrastructure thing. Some time soon, I'll probably stop being lazy and move this website itself off Bluehost to an AWS-based solution (or maybe Azure if I'm feeling contrarian).

OneDrive or Dropbox should work. I shy away from DropBox because we've had issues with employees exposing sensitive documents via DropBox lately, and we've chosen to block it. It's the only site we block in fact. :-(

I'll do the back of napkin math on costs for moving navalism.org to AWS and maybe providing enough storage space for saving images as attachments too.