14 DAY TRIAL // Photobucket, one of the biggest media hosting websites around, recently introduced paid membership accounts for its services. The company also introduced the possibility to send images to a user's mobile device directly from their website through the usage of a simple “Send to phone” button in the image menu.
Founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal in Denver, Photobucket immediately attracted a huge amount of visitors, soon becoming Imageshack's main competitor on the image-hosting market. In July 2007, the company was acquired by Fox Interactive Media, a division of media giant News Corp.
The PRO account is currently available for about $25 per year, offering unmetered bandwidth, possibilities of uploading high-resolution photos up to 4000 x 3000 pixels, total storage size of up to 25GB, video length of up to 10 minutes, no ads in the album page and a 10 percent discount when acquiring print or photo products.
On the other hand, free users have a 10 GB per month traffic limit, 500 MB storage space and the regular Photobucket services (slideshows, private albums, prints, collages, etc.).
After providing free services for their users, since August 20 this year, Photobucket has introduced PRO accounts into its services. And as always, along with a paid membership service there is a disgruntled community, but unfortunately for Photobucket, their community is a big one, and it had something to say about it.
The problem seems to have appeared when a lot of members were not informed in time of the changes and some of the images hosted on Photobucket were replaced with a nasty looking sticker on the member's website, where some images have been hotlinked.
Other problems were recorded when members used their monthly limit (in 2-3 of days for big accounts) and some of their accounts automatically got blocked, having to contact the Photobucket support for troubleshooting. Let's say it will be a while until the message boards silence.
But to compensate for these recent changes, members received a new cool feature from Photobucket, the ability to send images to the user's mobile phone directly from the Photobucket website.
This comes to complete a set of new feature released this summer, like: Visual Search using Microsoft Silverlight, upload from Palm Pre devices, Yahoo! Mail integration and Twitgoo (media sharing website for Twitter users).