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Amazon and eBay Images Broken By Photobucket's 'Ransom Demand' (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Thousands of images promoting goods sold on Amazon and other shopping sites have been removed after a photo-sharing service changed its terms. Ebay and Etsy have also been affected, in addition to many forums and blogs. The problem has been caused by Photobucket introducing a charge for allowing images hosted on its platform to be embedded into third-party sites. The company caught many of its members unaware with the change, prompting some to accuse it of holding them to ransom. Denver-based Photobucket is now seeking a $399 annual fee from those who wish to continue using it for "third-party hosting" and is facing a social media backlash as a consequence.
"Host your own data! Eschew 'The Cloud'!"
Be careful when choosing to host images via Someone Else's System. If you're not paying them, they've got some other business plan going on, and it may not be to every end user's advantage.
Because if you sell a lot of items on a number of different platforms it makes more sense to upload the images once and then link to them from the various platforms.
Its hard to really blame Photobucket, if the images are embedded everywhere then they have no opportunity to show ads and fund servers. People using them for commercial purposes have no justification for complaints other than lack of notice.
But that costs money
I don't have many issues with someone charging for what has effectively been free hosting. However, the last time I was there Photobucket looked like a giant clusterfuck. 'You need to enable javascript to view the image even though it's already been loaded in the background and we're just not showing it', etc.
If photobucket tries anything too extreme to make money, they're going to be dumped in favor of literally any other service that isn't completely awful.
You don't have any idea what "no free lunch" means, do you?
Somebody, somewhere always has to pay for that "free lunch". The person eating it may not have to pay (be it money, time, effort, whatever), but someone always has to.
What's to stop them from adding a logo or ad banner directly onto the image so that, for example, the bottom 1/4 of the embedded image contains "Hosted by Photobucket, and sponsored by..."
If Ebay or Etsy have an issue with that, they can easily prevent embedded images from Photobucket in posts on their site and force their users to utilize another service.
Every time I hear or see someone talk about 'The Cloud', I make certain to remind them (or explain to them) that 'The Cloud' is literally nothing more than someone else's computer.
By putting your stuff (whatever it is) on 'someone else's computer' you are trusting that, they will respect your privacy, not mess with or copy your data, and when they eventually lose interest in keeping your data for you (and they will, someday) that they give you the warning and opportunity to get your data back before they turn off their computer.
Because back in the day Ebay at least didn't offer photo hosting. My sister has been selling things on Ebay since the 90s and she hosts her images on my server for the simple reason that it's the way she's always done it and it works well. Now on top of that she has an independent site hosted on my server that also sells the same items and reuses the same image links.
I imagine a lot of Photobucket users started off doing it a few images at a time when they first started and now it's a matter of process inertia and a large number of images that would have to be moved. People aren't necessarily idiots for doing it, they do what works simply for them with their limited experience.