What broke every Photobucket link in 2017?
Photobucket changed its terms of service effective June 20, 2017 and stopped serving images to other websites. Anyone who had pasted a Photobucket link into a forum thread, a fan page or a classified listing watched the photo turn into a gray box asking for money.
The company had folded third-party hosting, the feature that let an image live on Photobucket but appear somewhere else, into a single expensive plan. It was called Plus 500, and it cost $399.99 a year.
Almost nobody was warned. Millions of posts across hobbyist boards, motorcycle forums, quilting communities and shopping listings broke in the same few days, and the graphic that replaced each picture told readers the account holder needed to upgrade.
Photobucket chief executive John Corpus defended the decision in a July 2017 statement, blaming "the rise of ad blockers and the Company's explosion of 3rd party hosting that generates zero revenue." He said 75 percent of the company's costs came from non-paying users whose images were being loaded elsewhere. "This model is no longer sustainable," Corpus wrote, in remarks 9News reported that year.
How did Photobucket become the photo album of the MySpace era?
Photobucket launched in 2003, built by two Level 3 Communications engineers, Alex Welch and Darren Crystal, outside Denver. It answered a question the early web had no good response to: where does a picture live when the site you want to post it on will not store it for you?
That question got much louder once MySpace arrived. MySpace profiles were endlessly customizable and came with almost no storage, so the glitter graphics, layout backgrounds and profile banners of 2005 and 2006 were served from somewhere else. Photobucket became that somewhere else for a very large share of them.
CNBC reported 41 million registered Photobucket users in May 2007, up from 2 million in 2004. Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp division that also owned MySpace, agreed that month to buy the company for about $250 million in cash, with performance payments of up to $50 million on top.
The fit lasted about two years. News Corp sold Photobucket in 2009 to Ontela, a Seattle mobile imaging startup, in a deal TechCrunch reported valued the site at about $60 million, roughly a fifth of what News Corp had paid. Ontela took the Photobucket name and has run it independently ever since.
Why did free accounts disappear in 2023?
The 2017 price did not hold. On May 17, 2018 a new management team announced an ad-free plan with storage and third-party hosting "for just $1.99 per month (or $19.99 per year)" and switched the blocked images back on. That same announcement promised that "a free subscription option is still available to customers who do not require third-party image hosting."
The reprieve did not fix the underlying math. Storing billions of files costs money every month, and an image loaded inside somebody else's forum thread shows none of Photobucket's advertising.
In June 2023 Photobucket ended free accounts altogether. Free users received a message telling them the company no longer supported free subscriptions and their account had been deactivated. The photos were not deleted. The door was simply locked.
The effect on the open web was permanent. Every thread whose author had stopped logging in years earlier stayed broken, and nothing is coming along to fix it. The habit had moved on anyway: free rivals such as Imgur absorbed the forum-posting crowd, Flickr kept the photographers, and phone backup services took everyone else.
Who owns Photobucket today, and what does it cost?
Photobucket Inc. owns and runs the service in 2026. It is the former Ontela, privately held, with no parent conglomerate behind it and no larger company covering the storage bill. Reuters put the staff at 40 people in Edwards, Colorado in April 2024, and the company has been a Colorado business since 2003.
Ownership has not changed in more than fifteen years, which is the short answer to the question people type. What changed is the product: the free image host is gone and a storage subscription took its place.
The entry plan, My Bucket, is $5 a month for one terabyte of photo and video storage. Group Buckets adds sharing and editing tools at $8 a month, and the Hosting plan, which carries the third-party hosting that made Photobucket essential and then notorious, runs $13 a month.
A limited free plan came back in early 2026, and only at first sign-up: up to three Groups, unlimited invitations, mobile autobackup, and a view restricted to the 50 most recent photos and videos in each Group, according to Photobucket's own Free Plan support article. It is a sampler, not the free host of 2005, and it does not reopen a deactivated account.
Can you get your old Photobucket photos back?
Usually yes, if you can still get into the account. Deactivated accounts were locked rather than erased, so the files are generally still there, and starting a paid plan restores access long enough to download the albums.
The obstacles are practical ones. Plenty of accounts were opened with a college address that stopped working in 2008, or under a username nobody wrote down, and password recovery through a dead mailbox goes nowhere. The 2026 free plan is no help here, because it is offered to new sign-ups rather than as a way back into an old bucket.
When the account itself is unreachable, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is the next stop. Public forum threads were often crawled while the images still loaded, so an archived copy of the page can hold a picture the original poster lost.
If the originals only ever existed as prints or negatives in a shoebox, that is a different job. Mail-in services such as ScanMyPhotos handle a box at a time, and scanning them yourself costs less if you have the hours to spare.
Why does Photobucket want to sell 13 billion photos to AI companies?
In April 2024 Photobucket chief executive Ted Leonard told Reuters the company was in talks with multiple technology companies about licensing its archive of roughly 13 billion photos and videos to train image-generating models. He put the rates under discussion at 5 cents to $1 per photo, and more than $1 per video.
"We need to pay our bills, and this could give us the ability to continue to support free accounts," Leonard told Reuters in 2024, in comments PetaPixel reported that April. Reuters also reported that only about 2 million people still used the service, down from a peak when Photobucket was the largest image host on the web.
Users had not clearly agreed to any of it. Photobucket revised its terms and gave account holders a 45-day window to opt out, after which consent was treated as given.
In December 2024 four former users filed a proposed class action, Pierce v. Photobucket, in federal court in Colorado over the licensing plan and several state biometric privacy laws. On March 10, 2026 the court let most of the case go forward, holding that leaving an old account sitting untouched is not the same as agreeing to new terms, and sent one named plaintiff's claims to arbitration. No class has been certified and no settlement has been announced as of October 2026.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Photobucket still around in 2026?
Yes. Photobucket still operates in 2026 as a paid photo and video storage service run by Photobucket Inc. of Colorado, with plans that start at $5 a month for one terabyte and a Hosting plan at $13 a month. What no longer exists is the free image host people used between 2003 and 2023.
Is Photobucket free in 2026?
Mostly no. Photobucket deactivated every free account in June 2023, and in early 2026 it brought back a limited free plan for new sign-ups only, capped at three Groups with just the 50 most recent photos and videos visible in each one. Keeping a real archive on Photobucket in 2026 means a paid plan, starting at $5 a month for one terabyte.
Why are my old Photobucket images broken on forums?
Photobucket stopped serving images to other websites on June 20, 2017 unless the account paid $399.99 a year for third-party hosting, and it deactivated all remaining free accounts in June 2023. Any Photobucket picture embedded in a forum post by an account that has since lapsed will stay broken, because only an active paid plan that includes hosting makes those links load again.