Photobucket fail

[Uh-oh.]

In the late aughts, I began to upload images to Photobucket for use on Orange Crate Art. I recall some sort of problem back then with images uploaded directly to Blogger. When Blogger began working properly again, I forgot all about Photobucket — until yesterday, when I noticed the above image taking the place of a photograph in an old post. And thus I learned about recent doings at Photobucket. Long story short: in late June, Photobucket changed its terms of service. This change came without warning to the service’s users. Third-party hosting (or “3rd Party Hosting,” as Photobucket calls it) now requires that a user sign up for a plan that costs $399.99 a year. In other words, if you’ve uploaded images to Photobucket, embedded them elsewhere, and want the images to keep showing up where they’ve always showed up, it’ll cost you — a lot.

Or it won’t. Yesterday afternoon I spent a couple of hours uploading missing images to Blogger, sixty-odd images in all. Some of the posts that lost their images are still (surprisingly) popular. No matter: things should be right, even if a post never gets read again. When I was done, I deleted my Photobucket account. Good riddance. But if I’d made greater use of Photobucket, I’d really be in the soup now. Just look at what Twitter has to say about #photobucket.

On top of the preposterous “$399.99,” the meter in that placeholder picture is an extra dab of stupid. Have my sixty-odd images really exceeded some measurable limit for “3rd Party Hosting Usage”? Only if the limit for usage is any.

[From the Photobucket website: “Photobucket defines 3rd party hosting as the action of embedding an image or photo onto another website. For example, using the <img> tag to embed or display a JPEG image from your Photobucket account on another website such as a forum, auction listing, blog, etc. is definitively 3rd party hosting.” “Definitively”? Who writes this stuff?]