I never did understand why people used "3rd party image hosting" (e.g. photobucket) at all. It used to be you would get "bandwidth exceeded" messages for images hosted on photobucket for example. Now this. I'm sorry but I really have to wonder what people thought was going to happen to their "free image hosting"??
You don't understand Photobucket John. If memory serves, it was $24 a year to host/store my photos. I then shared them on a half dozen forums. It was only when I had a massively popular thread that went was more than a dozen pages on several different forums did I hit the bandwidth limit. But for $2.25 (iirc), I'd buy another tier of bandwidth that would open the photos up again. That only happened to me twice in 11 years.
When I take a photo worth sharing, I share it on those half dozen forums through Photobucket. aaannnddd "done". A few clicks and my photo is "everywhere" I am. As you say, what I "thought" was going to happen, was that they continue to perform a serving we all mutually agreed upon at the predetermined price.
They then decided that it should cost more than a dollar a day. That's pure extortion. No way will I pay more for photo hosting than I do for full coverage car insurance for the same time period.
Plus, there's no way I'm going to upload my photo to each and every forum I'm on. That would become a full time job if I had a large topic that was ongoing for some time. I couldn't imagine having my "Father and Daughter speaker build" thread on a half dozen forums if I had to upload those photos to each forum I was on. And like I said earlier, I don't like the idea of my threads being destroyed by one mans whim when he feels there are too many images in his gallery (see my earlier post about Decware). Because, I'm not paying that guy harddrive space and bandwidth to store/host my pictures on his forum. Like you said, {quote}
"I'm sorry but I really have to wonder what people thought was going to happen to their "free image hosting"??" When I was using Photobucket for "free", he's still getting paid by advertisers. But apparently they don't feel like their previous charges where near enough.
There just isn't an economically reasonable way of doing this. Not that I've found. So as far as I'm concerned, I just won't be posting any more photographs. Except for on Facebook. They seem to have worked out the bugs for storing and sharing videos and photos.
Maybe some forum owners should take a page from Mr. Facebook in that regard. I mean after all, this is just "social networking", just on a specific topic.
