The issue here isn't that PhotoBucket are charging to host images. It's the no-notice change and the size of the charge.<p>Effectively they've knocked people off Ebay telling them that they can keep their sales for a one-off payment of £300.<p>If they'd given them two weeks notice then people could have evaluated the cost and decided if £300/year was a reasonable amount to pay, or if they should migrate elsewhere.<p>Doing it like this basically forces some people to pay up instantly. That's not fair dealing, that's rather more mafia-like.
No sympathy here. If anyone relies on a free service, they must anticipate said service changing terms or functionality at any point in time, or even disappearing completely. It's unfortunate it affects many users who had no say in the choice of the infrastructure (say, many of those stamp bulletin board members), but that's how it goes. It's silly to use a free-of-charge service as infrastructure.<p>Besides, if I am reading correctly, and there is in fact no data lost, calling it "ransom" is just ridiculous - nothing is being hold ransom here.
This is the normal cycle of Internet image host, its shocking photobucket took this long to reach this point.<p>There is fundamentally no profit in hosting images for free that people embed/link directly.<p>The same thing has happened to countless image hosts beforehand, and is going to happen to imgur too as soon as the music stops and the stacks of VC cash fueling the furnace are all burned away.<p>This is a great example of a market failure. Nobody wants a sustainable model where the image host can actually make money. As soon as they start taking away the "direct image links" feature, which is the only feature anyone actually cares about, and the thing that has zero possibility to make money, ever, everyone flees onto the next host, and the cycle starts anew.<p>We need another solution here. Maybe IPFS? Maybe torrents? Maybe some image hosting foundation?<p>It sucks badly that the Internet loses its collective image heritage every few years because somebody else thought that they could give it away for free and make it up in volume.
Might be worth Amazon's and Ebay's time to detect when things like this happen and automatically alert their sellers. Or even better, cache and serve the images themselves (why aren't they already doing that?)
"I have been using your site for 10+ years [...] You are extortionists. You are EVIL"<p>And in those 10 years, how much did you pay for this service?
If confirmed, the demand for $399 per year puts Photobucket solidly in the ransom price range. Renting a web server with ample space and bandwidth is much less expensive.
And this is why you offer local image/file uploads on your platform/forum. You simply can't rely on a free this party service to stay alive forever, especially something unprofitable as image hosting
It's a shame Amazon doesn't contract with some image hosting service for its store. Maybe they could use Azure or Google Cloud Storage to serve files via HTTP.
Given that many if the images were used for temporary postings, I wonder how much backlash could have been avoided by letting old images he accessed by this parties but blocking images uploaded after a certain date?
I am of the crowd who thinks this is Amazon and eBay's fault. What insanity would let you use a third-party hosted photo on a product you are selling. The number of things that could go wrong are mind boggling and all will be put on your site since that is what is currently in the address bar.<p>Also, does the third-party site have as good of security as you do? Are you going to get pictures, that shall we say, are not up to your community standards and don't represent the product?<p>Asking free to give you a notice is just poor business.
I spent a little time last week when I found out about this writing an extension to make the images work, <a href="https://github.com/kzahel/photobucket-embed-fix" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kzahel/photobucket-embed-fix</a><p>The extension gets permission for Photobucket domains and modifies the referer header. Very simple.
Does anyone have an example of a detail page with an externally hosted product image? I'm like 90% certain amazon hosts its own images. I wonder if the sellers are using external URLs to upload their listings through seller central, and Amazon automatically creates the listing with the placeholder image hosted on Amazon.
Amazon and Ebay should consider paying some multiple of the $399/year Photobucket is asking to remove these messages on their websites. After all, they are benefiting from the free image hosting, too. That could be a better business model for an image hosting site than charging end users, too.
Forget the Amazon and eBay listings - those will the fixed, I'm sure. The real tragedy here are the forums and other non-commercial uses that may be lost forever.
Having notice and potentially adding a banner at the bottom of affected images to warn of the change would have been nice.<p>Photobucket still seems to do that weird detection where if you load an image url in your browser it takes you to the webpage filled with ads
Nah, same story as with guys who do bait and switch with dev tooling and libs on NPM. One day an angry client calls you with "Dependency A, broke down in B," you take a look at code to see some lib in dependency tree outputting "feature A is now paid" in ASCII art.<p>Don't be reliant on public services.