The popular platform for storing multimedia content and sharing it through blogs, forums and social networks, Photobucket has messed it up again. In 2017, overnight and without warning, it cut off free access to third parties in exchange for $399 per year so that users could continue to use the platform, which, unsurprisingly, caused a mass exodus to other platforms like Pinterest. Although in 2018, it launched cheaper plans, it seems that it has changed its mind again and has cut off access to all users with a free account.
Photobucket has started sending an email to all users of this platform informing them that their account has been deactivated because they no longer offer support for free accounts. Thus, unilaterally and without prior notice, something quite common in this company that seems not to learn from the mistakes of the past. Obviously, if we pay for any of the different plans that it offers us, we will never receive this email.
Fortunately, although the account has been deactivated, all the content that we have stored inside it has not been deleted, at least for now. In the email that has been sent to the users of the free accounts, a link is included that allows them to reactivate the account and recover access.
That does not mean that we can continue using the platform as before. The idea of recovering access is to allow users to make a backup copy of all the photos they have stored over the years to migrate it to other platforms or, to contract one of the 3 storage plans.
- Lite plan with 25 GB of storage for $6 per month or $65 per year on an annual basis.
- Plus plan with 250 GB + hosting for $8 per month ($87 per year), although it is currently on sale for $5 per month ($50 per year) to celebrate the platform’s 20th birthday.
- premium plan with unlimited storage. This plan is priced at $13 per month and includes web hosting. If we hire the annual plan, the price stays at $141.
Considering the history of this company and its changes of course without prior notice, it really is not worth continuing to use it, Pinterest being one of the best options on the market to Photobucket. This platform is mainly used to insert content links on websites to reduce bandwidth, so these have stopped working and the only way to recover them is by checking out or changing the link to content hosted on Photobucket.
In addition, no one can assure us that within a year, the prices of the plans reduce the amount of space or maintain it by increasing the price of the subscription. What is clear is that after seeing how this company works, the best we can, if we are users, is to look for other options with a more stable operating history.
