After years of allowing direct linking to images on its servers for free account users, Photobucket abruptly changed its terms of service last week to disallow direct linking to images for all account levels except its most expensive paid account level, which (currently) costs $40 a month. They also replaced all images with an image of a message to upgrade to their premium service. So all of the images on my blog will be broken until I move them somewhere else and then update all of the links in all of the posts on my blog, which is going to be a pain. But not so much of a pain that I'm going to pay Photobucket $500 a year. I tried using Google Drive to fix my most recent post, which seems to work, but it's way too cumbersome to do for all of them. Plus behind the scenes it gives ugly, meaningless URLs. The first step to fixing the pictures is going to be downloading the dozens of albums I have on Photobucket, which fortunately they allow people to do (for now). Then I have to find someplace to put them, then fix all the blog posts. You, the reader, will know this is all done when all of the pictures are back.
