As many of you know, Photobucket decided to start charging almost $400 a year for people to be able to do "third party hosting," i.e., have their photos viewable on other sites. Needless to say, a lot of people like me, who had previously posted photos in blogs and similar places under their old way of doing things, feel that this new policy amounts to a ransom demand and are refusing to pay the fee.

I have no problem with them wanting to make money. However, I feel that, if they wanted to change the policy, they should have grandfathered the millions of photos that they had already allowed to be "third party hosted" for free, or -- at the very least -- imposed a more reasonable fee for those photos. They didn't do either one.

Like many of us, I can't just drop everything and reload those photos to another service. Over the next few months I'll go though my posts and see what I can do. In the meantime, I'm sorry things turned out this way.