Online retail giants like Amazon and eBay were shocked to see that the images used for promoting the Goods And Services in the respective sites had suddenly disappeared.
Photobucket is an online photo-sharing service based in Denver that came into existence in the year 2003. Its primary utility used to be the "free" accounts backed by advertisements that could be utilized by the online retailers for uploading images of the various goods and services from one destination to different outlets.
Photobucket removes product images from Amazon and others
It is said to have almost around hundred million customers and, at the same time, its servers are reported to hold more than 15 billion images. Of late, Photobucket has gone for a policy change and is charging a hefty fee from its customers to continue the services of using the images for uploading to the various third party sites.
The annual fee of $399 that it is charging at present for "third-party hosting" of images has led to a hue and cry amongst the customers spread across the social media. In fact, the company also received accusations and allegations from some of its clients complaining about the fact that the change was done all of a sudden and without any prior notice or intimation about the same.
The BBC is yet to receive comment from the company spokespersons and is only holding an automated response from the company for the time being. [July 7, 2017]
Social media reacts vehemently against Photobucket
Popular online social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter witnessed mass protests and complaints from the customers of Photobucket about its recent change of policies and actions.
However, in this regard, it can be stated that on June 26, a short note was published by the company that advised the users to go through the updated terms and policies of the company and the notice was accompanied by a 500-words document declaring the fact that the usage of free accounts for linking of the images to the third party sites will not be permitted any more.
This came as a big blow to the users when they found the images being removed from the sites instead of being replaced by graphics telling them to update the Photobucket accounts.
[Updated July 7, 2017]
This article has been corrected from the original edit. "Etsy" was removed from the list of companies that were "shocked to see that the images used for promoting the goods and services in the respective sites had suddenly disappeared."
Blasting News (on behalf of Blaster "Sowmiya") received this clarification, from an Etsy spokesperson in response to the information included in this article. "Etsy" was also removed from
"Etsy serves images via internally hosted web servers and cloud-based hosting, such as Amazon S3. Photobucket's recent changes do not directly impact how Etsy is displayed to our visitors, as no images when visiting etsy.com are served via their service."
