I was curious if anyone else had felt the impact of Photobucket's recent changes and what image hosting services you use instead.
For those who don't know, Photobucket is(was) a website where you could upload photos, get a link to that photo, and then display that pic on another site with that link (like here). This was the point of Photobucket since the early days (mid 2000s at least), but suddenly on a dime they ended these links and want $399US annual fee from a user to restore the links.
I think Photobucket had a terrible business model because I couldn't see how they got revenue, but it persisted so I didn't care. If they want to end hotlinking that's their prerogative, but to remain a viable business they handled this change in the worst possible way: no warning, no gradual reduction in features, and people are getting the impression their photos are being held for ransom. Users cannot even log in to download their pics, supposedly they remain allowed to do so, but the site is so notoriously buggy that it's hard to say if they really are holding the pics for ransom or if they just can't get the feature to work.
I was unable to find any of my own posts that still showed a pic.