Photobucket

Photobucket is an American image and video site, web service suite and online community, which was infamous for the controversial P500 subscription plan that hid images hotlinked from the site behind an error message unless one paid $399 per year for the plan. It was created by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal on May 8, 2003.

Why Their Business Sucks Now

 * 1) On June 26, 2017, Photobucket announced a major change to how the website works, requiring a $399 yearly subscription fee plan called P500 for those who want to hotlink images from its servers to display on other sites, something it had offered for free before. As a result, many images hotlinked from the site display the error message shown on your right unless you pay for the P500 plan or use 3rd-party extensions or downloaders, including gallery-dl, to get rid of the error.
 * 2) Like ImageShack, you have to pay for something that was previously free when you can just get something similar for free on other websites.
 * 3) Updates to the site often plague the site with third-party advertisements with no control on malicious content, making this site very unsafe to use without an ad-blocker.
 * 4) TinyPic shut down in September 2019, and all users were switched to PhotoBucket, as they had bought that site. This however, turned most of the images broken, as most of the legacy links that relied on Tinypic no longer work anymore.
 * 5) Searching for images nowadays just refers you to different sites, like Shutterstock, which basically defeats the purpose of searching for images on a dedicated image-hosting website.
 * 6) Since the announcement began effective on June 1, 2019, all embedded images have been blurred and watermarked that are unviewable for using more than 25MB of bandwidth.