It was brought to my attention that some of the photos shown in the Dennis restoration have disappeared. We get a message saying please update your account to enable third party hosting as can be seen here:
http://hmvf.co.uk/forumvb/showthread.php?429-WW1-Dennis-truck-find/page124
It is required that an annual payment of $399 is made to pay for this. I have done some more research and found this:
"Photobucket is cracking down on people embedding on third-party websites images it hosts, until now, for free.
The photo-slinging internet elder now says that anyone who wants to use its service to display photos it hosts on other pages – such as signature banners in forum posts – will now need to open up their wallets and plop down $399.99 a year for a subscription plan.
The new policy will be particularly annoying to longtime users who have relied on Photobucket's 14-year-old service to host the images they use to place images on forums or in blog posts.
Cheaper plans, including the free account option, will no longer have an option to allow third-party hosting.
The alert netizens now get from Photobucket for inlining images on third-party sites
The change of heart was quietly introduced by Photobucket earlier this week as an update to its terms of service.
On the one hand, it's reasonable for Photobucket to ask for some help in footing its bandwidth bills for serving up images for folks on other websites; on the other hand, it will break a lot of graphics posted on the 'net and inlined in forums and blogs.
"Photobucket defines 3rd-party hosting as the action of embedding an image or photo onto another website," the updated T&Cs read.
"For example, using the <img> tag to embed or display a JPEG image from your Photobucket account on another website such as a forum, Etsy, eBay auction listings, a blog, etc, is definitively 3rd-party hosting."
"
Strangely it has affected Dads photobucket but not mine yet. It will be a real shame if all the photos that I have uploaded on our restorations are going to disappear.
Has anybody else come across this and is my understanding of this correct? Having done a Google search there does appear to be a lot of discussion on the subject so it appears that unless I pay the $399 annual fee all the photos will now go. A shame. I am feeling really quite annoyed, verging on miffed.
Thanks
Tim