Another photo hosting service becomes useless

For me it started with Imagestation (an old Sony company) which was kind enough to transfer my photos to Shutterfly (completely useless service). I started using Picasa which was great as I was able to easily upload, store and link photos to places such as here. About a year ago Picasa removed linking capability and became a lot less user friendly for me.

I had always had a side account with Flickr and Photobucket as they were free. The storage space was low, at the time, but it was a backup. For me both these services are confusing to navigate and are full of pop ups but up until today were my only way to post up photos.

Today Photobucket announced it's removing linking capabilities and breaking links to hosted photos, unless you have a specific subscription. They still offer the capability but it'll cost $399/year.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/354711/ph...s-the-internet

I don't remember this level of disappointment, with the exception of a few here, when Picasa did this but nonetheless. As far as I know Picasa does not offer a pay level that unlocks linking. Look forward to many broken links to photos here and elsewhere on the internet.

Yeah, the level of disappointment is very high this morning...

F%$* Photobucket
I might still be a little bitter over them losing ALL my photos from the last decade earlier this year
just because . . .

http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/a0/a0beb...2180f4fa05.jpg

Well that is just poop, I guess I better Log into my accounts and download all the photos I have just in case since right now my external backup harddrive seems to not want to connect...

What happen internet? Why you do this?

So far I'm happy with smugmug and they have link capability.

For a couple of years I've used whatever tapatalk has for hosting. It works great. I do have some photos on photobucket that I will have to download though. I think this is going to put them out of business though.

Mike, that is bad news, most of my posted pics are on photobucket. It is so annoying when you find a post about exactly what you are looking for and the link to all the pictures are dead. I was wondering how long the free service wold last but $400 is ridiculous.

I am also very happy with SmugMug been using it for my personal pictures for about 2 years now with no complaints. Last post I made here I linked to smugmug and was surprised that the links don't point back to my personal account (I am a little paranoid about internet privacy). It is one of the few things that I think is worth more to me than I pay for it, about $60 a year for unlimited storage at full picture resolution.

I've been using Flickr but I'm sure it will go the way of Picasa and Photobucket one day. I might look into SmugMug or the like but really don't want another service. I guess the days of free hosting will be gone.

I have been using internet forums heavily these past few months learning how to perform various van-build tasks and I find it frustrating to see various detailed writeups where the pictures are missing. Posts even as recent as six months ago are now almost useless without the photos. As far as I'm concerned the actions of Google and Photobucket have broken the internet.

has anyone tried one of the browser add-ons/extensions to fix the missing photos in forum threads?

I've been using this one, and it seems to work well ;)

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/d.../related?hl=en

I have not. I will have to find one for Firefox. Stupid Photobucket...

thanks for the tip!