thearchivist.funPhotobucket puts a price on images embedded elsewhere
Photobucket changed its terms of service on 20 June 2017 so that showing its images on other websites required a paid plan. CSO Online reported on 5 July 2017 that embedded images were replaced by a notice asking the owner to update their account to enable third-party hosting. The paid plan that allowed it cost about 400 dollars a year according to the article, which gives both 399 and 400 as figures. The report said Photobucket had served photos to more than three million websites, and that the effect was to break very large numbers of images on third-party sites, including shops that embedded product pictures. The company's blog post on the terms did not mention that embedding would end unless users paid. This was not a shutdown. The images still existed in accounts. What disappeared was the link that let old pages show them, so old forum threads turned into text surrounded by placeholders.
Context and provenance
The lesson is about dependency, not deletion. A page that points at a file hosted elsewhere shows it only for as long as the host allows. Archives of such pages preserve the surrounding text and sometimes the placeholder, which is itself a record of the day access changed.
To judge whether a page lost its pictures to this change, view an archived copy captured before June 2017 and compare it with one captured after. The difference is the evidence. The source here dates the terms change but does not measure how many images disappeared, so do not quote the 'billions' phrase as a count.
Transmission timeline
- 2017-06-20
Updated terms of service take effect.
- 2017-06-26
Photobucket's blog notes the terms change without saying that embedding ends.
- 2017-07-05
CSO Online reports the effect on embedded images.
Why it matters
Ending free embedding broke the visual record of countless old pages without removing a single stored file.
What remains uncertain
The scale ('billions of images') is the article's claim and is not backed by a stated count. The exact price is given two ways in the source.
Sources and evidence
- CSO Online: Photobucket replaced millions of images with a ransom demand
Terms effective 20 June 2017, replacement image text, price figures, three million sites, absence of notice in Photobucket's blog post.
Editorial review: 2026-10-22. New evidence may change this account.