Here’s Why I’m One Of The Dummies Who Actually Pays For Photobucket

Back in 2017, Photobucket dealt a blow to the internet. The once-free image host quietly changed its business model, and practically overnight, millions of images were effectively removed from various forums and websites across the Internet. Photobucket then said that you could get your images back onto the pages of your favorite forums if you paid the company. I took the bait, and after Photobucket’s transition, I’ve been forking over $8 a month to the platform. But I’m doing it for what feels like a decent reason.

For most people, the concept of image hosting is an artifact of how the Internet and technology used to work. A lot of forums didn’t have a native image repository, so if you wanted to share a DIY car fix, your sweet computer build, or whatever else with your friends on the Internet, you had to upload the image elsewhere. Likewise, phones used to ship with only 8 gigabytes or 16 gigabytes of storage or so, and if you loved snapping pictures, it didn’t take long to fill up your phone.

Image hosting sites offer an easy way to keep your images only a few clicks away, right here on the Internet. Part of what made these sites great was that you could easily copy an image’s link and paste it into one or several forums. Photobucket was once a leader of image hosting. Founded in 2003, Photobucket was a free service that let you store photos on its servers and then share them to Tumblr, eBay, Reddit, Myspace, Facebook, or any number of Internet forums. People built websites featuring photos they stored on Photobucket. Photobucket even became the default image host of Twitter in 2011.

Until 2014, Photobucket made money the same way a lot of websites on the Internet did: It sold out portions of its site and mobile presence to advertisers. That way, the site was free to use, but still made money. Winds of change came in 2014, when Photobucket first announced a paid tier for people with large storage needs. Then, in 2017, Photobucket broke much of the Internet. I suppose I was one of the suckers, because when Photobucket started threatening to delete my photos, I started paying up. But, in a weird way, I’m also keeping a part of the old Internet alive.

Photobucket’s Blow To The Web

Photobucket’s disaster was one of its own making. On June 28, 2017, Photobucket changed its Terms of Use. Suddenly, Photobucket wasn’t going to allow the sharing of any photo from a free account anymore. At its peak in 2006, TechCrunch reported, a full two percent of America’s Internet traffic funneled through Photobucket. In 2019, it was the 1,500th most visited website in America. That should give you a sense of just how much was at stake here.

Unfortunately, Photobucket made this change practically overnight without much warning to its users. Suddenly, all sorts of Internet blogs, car forums, lifestyle forums, and even Dungeons & Dragons websites were more or less destroyed. Any site that displayed an image from Photobucket now displayed this image, instead:

The image below shows what happened to a page on a Dungeons & Dragons-themed website. As the Verge reported, an estimated 60 million images were effectively removed from the Internet after Photobucket changed this policy.

Photobucket had a solution. It said if you wanted to restore the function to your website, all you had to do was pay the company $399 per year. What a deal. This started an Internet wildfire and a PR nightmare for Photobucket. There was no shortage of people who claimed that Photobucket’s policy change was “extortion” or “blackmail.” Some people, who had a decade of work stored on Photobucket, paid the price. Others took their photos and either moved them to sites like Imgur or Google, or just went old-school and put their images on physical storage.

This had a profound effect on car forums. Suddenly, any thread containing an image from Photobucket was decimated. Entire how-to wrenching threads became wastelands of the infuriating image above. Sure, by 2017, a lot of car forums had their own image hosting, but someone who posted a how-to thread in 2008 might not have been around in 2017 to update their images. So, once-handy tutorials in car forums became useless, and it pissed off enthusiasts all over the car world.

Anyway, later in 2017, Photobucket would get a grade of “F” from the Denver/Boulder Better Business Bureau following a flood of complaints that Photobucket did not respond to. Photobucket’s traffic was already hurting in 2017 – which may have been the impetus for the new subscription model – but the plan worked. Here’s what Insider reported back then:

If Google Trends is anything to go by, interest in Photobucket has been going downhill since 2008.

[Photobucket representative Angela Fulcher] told INSIDER, however, that Photobucket was financially solvent before introducing P500. So it wasn’t necessarily a desperate survival tactic for the site. Furthermore, Fulcher said that P500 is a success so far, despite the backlash.

“The number of P500 subscribers are increasing substantially from week to week as our users appreciate the benefits of our platform’s ease of use and unlimited 3rd party hosting,” she told INSIDER.

My Photobucket Alternative Didn’t Last Long

I didn’t have the kind of money to give $399 to Photobucket at the time, so I let my images die. Instead, I found a more clever solution, or so I thought. At the time, I had a regular blog on Kinja that I called the Smart Blog. One day, I realized that I could upload as many pictures as I wanted into a post, save that post as a draft, and then share those images anywhere on the Internet, for free, in full resolution. It was basically old-school Photobucket, but better.

Admittedly, I never thought that Kinja would go anywhere. Likewise, since this wasn’t an advertised feature of Kinja, who knows how long I’d be able to use it as a photo hosting site without the powers that be realizing it. Of course, when Kinja, alongside Oppositelock, Jalopnik, and other sites, fell into the hands of G/O Media, that future changed. G/O Media killed all user-operated blogs, including my precious diary. In doing so, my entire Kinja photo repository was wiped out.

This one hurt even worse than Photobucket because while Photobucket replaced images with the annoying placeholders, G/O’s nuking of Kinja completely deleted the images. Any car forum thread that I embedded Kinja images into is now permanently broken.

In 2018, Photobucket dramatically lowered its barrier to image hosting. Now, you could restore your images to websites and forums for $20 per year. In late 2018, the plan changed again, and Photobucket offered 2 GB of photo storage with third-party hosting for $49 a year, 20 GB for $70 a year, and 2 TB for $124 a year. In 2019, the plans changed yet again, with Photobucket asking $60 for 25 GB, $84 for 250 GB, and $144 a year for unlimited storage.

Photobucket also decided to restore the images it removed in 2017, sort of. If you still had a free account in 2019 and had a bandwidth greater than 25 MB, the images you had embedded on car forums and blogs were back, but blurred out, low-resolution, and with a giant Photobucket watermark. In other words, your photos became only slightly better than useless. Since then, Photobucket adjusted this again, and now images are low-res with a watermark, but are otherwise clear.

I still run into these quirky images today. It was just this weekend when I was researching a noise that my wife’s Volkswagen is making, when I found a thread filled with images with big Photobucket watermarks (above).

I Gave In And Paid Up

As time marched forward, Photobucket would change how it advertises the subscription tiers. At first, Photobucket merely warned me that my account was near the limit for a free account. Okay, whatever. In mid-2019, this messaging changed to me being over the free limit. This made sense because I was now over the 25 MB bandwidth limit. But whatever, it was fine. At that point, I was using Photobucket purely for image storage.

In 2020, the messaging changed again. Not only was I over on bandwidth, but now I was over on storage, despite having not uploaded a single image to my Photobucket account since 2017. Photobucket just arbitrarily decided that my existing photos were now over the limit. Again, I did nothing.

In early 2021, Photobucket started telling me to delete photos from my account or start paying. I did nothing. By 2022, Photobucket got even more aggressive. Now, Photobucket kept saying that it was going to delete my photos because I wasn’t using my account. Weirdly, I was logging in from time to time and downloading my own photos. But I guess I wasn’t really “using” it.

But that scared me enough. Not to pay Photobucket, of course, but to download my photos and delete my own account. But there was a twist. While there were mass-download tools out there, a great deal of the photos that I downloaded from my own account were corrupted. At least in 2022, I couldn’t find a 100 percent effective way to download my photos unless I downloaded them one at a time. I thought that was downright diabolical, given the 2,020 photos I have on there. So, I paid up, $8 a month, to be exact. Photobucket finally got me after years of non-stop emails. Apparently, these weren’t empty threats, as Photobucket has allegedly deleted the images of some free accounts.

At first, I was pretty pissed off. The only reason I subscribed was that Photobucket didn’t even offer a clear way to leave the platform. So I was paying $8 just to keep my photos “safe.” I’ve only just now discovered that Photobucket has a way to download all of your photos at once, and I found it by accident.

Keeping A Part Of The Old Car Internet Alive

Yet, I also found an unintended benefit. If I ever search the net for a DIY thing for Smarts and I come up on an old thread I published, my photos are still there, and the thread is entirely intact. There are no giant Photobucket watermarks and no blurring. Just the same photos as I uploaded them to Photobucket as far back as 2008. Weirdly, I felt proud about that. So much of the Internet is different after Photobucket changed its policies, but if you view any car forum thread I’ve made, the photos are still there, just like the old-school Internet days.

So, Photobucket has gotten my money for four years because of this. I grew up when the Internet was seemingly a great exchange of ideas and information. There weren’t smartphones, no doomscrolling, no TikTok, and almost none of the toxicity that exists today. A lot of people logged onto their computers to hear “You’ve got mail!” and lost connections when someone picked up a phone.

I even remember the early days of YouTube when it was just random people doing random things. There wasn’t a Mr. Beast, millions of ads, StreetSpeed717s, or any nonsense like that. LimeWire was a big thing back then, too, and part of its hilarity was that you had no idea if the copy of Axel F from Crazy Frog was actually the file it was pretending to be.

In a strange way, paying for Photobucket let me hold on to some of those memories of the old Internet. Photobucket is the reason why I still have images from the first-ever Smart rally that I went to!

However, I am considering a change. As much as I want to keep an old car forum relevant, I have to face the fact that car forums have largely been replaced by Facebook. My old threads get zero traffic now, and the only person adding to the view counts of those threads is me. So, am I basically just spending $8 a month for my own amusement?

Facebook is a terrible platform for a car forum. The Facebook group search function doesn’t find what you’re looking for, and there are no “threads” in the traditional sense. Instead, someone just asks a question and people answer. Even when one of my old threads is relevant, I just copy and paste it into Facebook, photos, and all.

Is This Even Necessary Anymore?

Today, there is an easy way to download your photos from Photobucket that the site does not advertise:

• Go to your bucket from a desktop computer, then hit “select”.
• Click the first picture.
• Scroll all the way down to the end of your pictures, hold down the Shift key, and then click the final picture. Make sure the site shows all of your images highlighted
• Click “download”. Photobucket will email you a .zip archive a few minutes later.

The need to preserve these photos is further challenged by how Photobucket currently displays images from free accounts. There is a super easy, barely inconvenient way to get around the blurring and the watermark. Just right-click on the image and open it in a new tab. Or do the equivalent on your phone. You’ll get the image without the watermark and without blurring. Of course, Photobucket could change this at any time, but it’s been like this for years.

The Internet has changed a lot since Photobucket changed its policies in 2017. Practically overnight, car forums and all sorts of websites were changed for the worse. In the years since, the car Internet itself has evolved. Many forums don’t get the traffic they used to, as people use social media to exchange car ideas and car repair advice. Maybe I’m out of touch, but that seems so sad.

I am left asking myself if paying money to keep a part of the old Internet alive is worth it. With each passing day, I’m edging closer to the conclusion that it is not. But for now, if you see an old forum thread by “Miss Mercedes” or “Neonspinnazz,” there’s a good chance the photos in it are from Photobucket.

Top graphic image: Photobucket