People who have extensively used Photobucket for hosting free photos of stuff (esp. stuff up for sale / auction on sites like eBay and Amazon and Etsy) have had a rather rude awakening. With minimal notice (it appears), Photobucket is now asking for a substantial annual subscription price to allow such sharing. The notice was subtle and recent enough that a lot of items out there are broken (and still more historic information that people were using Photobucket as an image service to drive are similarly broken).
On the one hand, lots of outrage going around, much of it deserved. A major change like that should have been handled far better by Photobucket, rather than coming across as something like ransomware. While making a move to this model would inevitably drive a lot of users away from the site, with proper explanation and engagement, it could have been a painful but doable part of changing their business model.
On the other hand, this does demonstrate the problem of relying on free third-party services — when they stop being free (or the third party goes away), it breaks the Internet. And that's not just with folk like Photobucket. People who were using Google's Picasa as a photo hosting service for third party sites (commercial or simply social) discovered that, one day, Google was not going to offer that service any more. Google handled it a lot better, but the bottom line is, on the Internet as much as in Real Life, not only is there no such thing as a free lunch, but even if you've paid for lunch, er, a service, it might go away in the future. The same is true for free URL-shortening services, or anything else of the sort.
Bitrotted links or changing business models — there are always ongoing threats to that immediate use of information or that archival data. Keeping alternatives and backups and so forth remains the only way to make sure you don't lose anything. But even if you don't lose the data, there's no such thing as a maintenance-free Internet presence.
Amazon and eBay images broken by Photobucket’s ‘ransom demand’ – BBC News
An image sharing site’s change of policy stops photos appearing on Amazon, eBay and Etsy.
I'm glad I'm able to self-host for things like that. The other day I was recalling an RV trip I made in '98, when I was uploading photos for family and friends to see (sometimes via an acoustic coupler attacked to pay phones), and I checked and… yep, the site is still up.http://www.hinckley.com/family/Western98/