Goodbye Photobucket
Dear Photobucket. We have had a good time. There were nice moments during our relationship. But in the end, you left me cold and without options. So I am afraid I need to break up with you now, and move on to something better.
If like me, you relied in Photobucket to host images and provide easy-to-use embed code for use in 3rd party applications, then their recent policy changes will frustrate you. It was bad enough having the horrid adverts in your face when using it, but I dealt with it, since it was free. But no more. Now there is a charge. And it is absurd.
It's not that we don’t understand that Photobucket might need to charge a little money to pay for the services they provide. Fair enough. But now if you want to store images at PhotoBucket for embedding at 3rd party sites, the price is $399.00 a year. $399.00 a year!!!!! It used to be free. That is quite the increase in price.
People are not going to pay that, as the outrage on social media now reflects.
So, here is what you can use instead:
Go to https://www.flickr.com/ and create an account.
Upload the images you want to use at another 3rd party site.
They will appear in your Camera Roll (they will not yet appear in your photostream).
Go to your Camera Roll, and make the images public. Until you make them public you won’t be able to obtain the embed code for the image. You do this by clicking the ‘paddlelock’ icon on the lower left-side of the image in Flickr, and change the viewing settings to public (then the icon will become an ‘eye’).
You can also put the images into a special album from the Camera Roll page, if you want, though you don’t have to.
Once you make the image public, then the image should then appear in your PhotoStream.
Go to your Photostream, and click on the image you want to embed/use elsewhere.
Click on the image. You will see the ‘sharing’ icons appear in the lower right-side. Click on the ‘share’ arrow.
Then click on the BBCode in the popup window, which is the embed code you use to publish/show this image on other 3rd party sites.
Et voila... you have a free image hosting service you can use again.
Goodbye Photobucket.