You may have seen on some of your favourite blogs the following image…
Photobucket controversially changed their terms at the end of June so that anyone wanting to embed an image on a third party site (e.g. like a blog) would have to subscribe to their $399 “Plus 500” package. Bloggers (and other users like shop owners, people who have posted on forums, etc) were outraged as they didn’t feel like they had been informed with sufficient time to amend their websites. Many users have been using Photobucket for years, since the days of MySpace, so it’s pretty understandable why users are annoyed!
If you are affected by this, then unfortunately the only way to get your images showing on your blog again is to log into your Photobucket account, download them, and then reupload elsewhere. You can download all images in an album, which at least makes it a little easier to get the images out of Photobucket, but you will need to go through all of your old blog posts to reload your images.
So what alternatives are there?
Uploading To Your Blog Space
The easiest way to upload images for your blog is to upload them while writing your blog post. To save some space, you may want to resize your images to make sure that they are not overly huge – a photo taken on an iPhone 6 Plus is 3064 x 4032 which is too big for most blog posts! Resize your image to about half that and you shouldn’t lose any details, etc, but the file size will reduce. We like PicMonkey for quick and easy resizing.
Flickr
Flickr is a website for photo hosting which gives free users 1000GB of space and allows you to embed the photos in your blog posts. This is probably the best option if you don’t want to upload the images directly to your blog, and there are apps available so you can upload directly from your phone.
Own hosting
This is one more for the Blogger users – you might not want to have your blog on WordPress, but want to make sure your images aren’t affected by anything like this happening in the future. You would need to upload images to your own hosting via an FTP program, and you would need a domain name to point to that space. It’s probably a bit more involved than it really needs to be, but you would have piece of mind knowing that your images are OK for as long as you keep paying for the hosting.
Other Sites
Here are a few other sites that you can try – we haven’t tried any of these ourselves, so can’t recommend any in particular, but wanted to include as many as possible to give you some more choices!
vgy.me
imgur.com
Google Photos
Postimage.org
Have you tried any of these sites? Which would you recommend?
