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by Kelson Vibber, 2017-07-12
Back in the old days, before you could upload photos straight to Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, if you wanted to share pictures online you had to host them yourself. Or if you used something like LiveJournal, you could use their limited image galleries. But with space and bandwidth at a premium in those days, you could run into limits fast.
Thatâs where sites like Photobucket and Imgur came in. You could upload your images there, and then put them on your fan site, or your journal, or whatever. They were also good for posting anonymously, as in communities like Fandom!Secrets. And theyâre still good for posting images in places like Ebay listings, or online forums (yes, they still exist) that donât provide their own hosting.
But you know the problem with hosting your stuff with a third party. You canât guarantee theyâll stick around. And while Photobucket isnât closing up shop yet like GeoCities did (taking with it an entire generation of online fandom), theyâve suddenly blocked hotlinking (the main way people used it!)âŚunless you pay up $399/year for an advanced account.
GeoCities, RIP: Fandomâs Lost Pages
PCMag: Photobucket Breaks Image Links Across the Internet.
BuzzFeed minces no words, calling it âransom.â
So an awful lot of images across the internet have stopped working overnight.
Iâm starting to think about all my photos that are hosted on Flickr, now that Verizon owns it. I donât think theyâre likely to do something similar, and Flickrâs paid service is a lot cheaper than Photobucketâs. But Yahoo was never quite sure what to do with it, and Verizon⌠wellâŚ
It might be time to move my âpull in remote Flickr embedsâ project off the back burner, just in case.
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