Back up Your Photos so That Companies Like Photobucket Can’t Hold Them for Ransom
You are dust and you will return to dust unless you pay Photobucket $ 400 a year. The 14-year-old photo hosting company recently stopped allowing third-party sites to display their photos for free. The move instantly broke images on blogs, homepages, and eBay and Amazon listings, and infuriated longtime users. Some users even have trouble uploading their own images, which is an expensive lesson on the way home: Never trust a third-party site to keep your photos forever.
Every few months or years, the old hosting service shuts down or starts charging for previously free services, often leaving users with little or no time to recover their data. As Casey Chan of Gizmodo said when Webshots deleted his photos in 2012, “Your old photos on the Internet will be deleted.” Full stop. Flickr will shut down someday, as will Picasa, Imgur and Facebook. Maybe in a year, maybe in a century, but it will happen. So always keep a local copy of your photos, just like all of your other invaluable data. And keep a couple of backups in the cloud in case your house burns down.