your thoughts on (current) Photobucket?

I came across archived (old-school) Photobucket posts

What the hell happened to Photobucket?

It's definitely not what I remember.

I honestly dislike it and how it runs nowadays. The recent update made it so embedded images are replaced with banner ads pushing the owner of the account to upgrade to a premium membership if they want to embed images offsite on forums and whatnot.

On the flipside, when I used Photobucket in my earlier years online, my account got banned after I updated my information to change my birthday. I'm not going to lie and say I never lied about my age to share my art and animations, but I don't see how that warrants erasing my entire account just because I joined Photobucket when I was 12, even though I was 13 at the time that I changed my information. All of those images are gone for good now, and I have no hope of recovering them.

Long story short, it's effectively useless if you don't pay up. Even before the 2017 hotlinkmageddon, it started forcibly resizing images by height as well as width—several DYOS colleagues used it as their primary host, two regularly for tall pages, and those are now shrunk to illegibility. I'd tried it as a replacement when ImageShack went pay-to-play but it kept shrinking my long comics and soon gave that up; I used it for hosting various forum embeds, and have been gradually working through rehosting those images to replacement sites.

I downloaded everything for if-and-when they made good on the ransomware spam threats; images are still in the old forum posts so presumably they haven't killed my account (yet).

before 2017 make Photobucket unusable without paying it, I use it regularly in my earlier online days

when I revisit my Photobucket recently, everything I posted there disappeared so I ended up deleting my Photobucket account

2017 Photobucket being useless without paying it did help make Fill-in memes overruns deviantart, from people using deviantart as Photobucket clone

I've had several as a teenager because it was the most useful free and long-running host, but of course it had to go to shit. It's evil how they watermark images now and hold your account's images hostage unless you pay. I've honestly considered shelling out the $5 just to access to old art, because it's not archived anywhere else...

Good grief, I just checked and they really did go full ransomware on legacy accounts. D:

You might try asking for a dump of your gallery on the grounds you were never forwarned about the change: there were multiple TOS revisions after 2017 for which I never received a notifying e-mail, and I think I only discovered they were terminating free hosting altogether through a chance login in 2021.

The 'F' grade is definitely earned. Company replies mention a free trial, but multiple users have then complained about overbilling, so be wary pursuing that option.

Photobucket may remove everything posted by legacy users there did help killing Photobucket for even me

update: I come across another review of photobucket

Unfortunately I still have access to the email of one account, and I was warned about the TOS changes (got an email this morning about a new one) and how I can only access my files for a limited time last year. I could maybe use that for another that I might have connected to another email, but it's scummy business practice overall, since I forgot the account even existed until I got ransomware'd about it...

as better as oldschool photobucket than current one, it can't be perfect and Photobucket is a cesspool for people that recolors pre-existing characters and call those recolors OC

I don't even remember my login for that but sadly I don't use it anymore and probably forgot about it even being there in the first place. 

If you opt to delete your account, you're offered an e-mail link to download your entire gallery as a .ZIP file for free.

And since they'll be scraping galleries for AI training, you'll probably want to delete yours.

I has commented in your journal about photobucket