Photobucket

History

Photobucket was founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal and received funding from Trinity Ventures. It was acquired by Fox Interactive Media in 2007.

In December 2009, Fox's parent company, News Corp, sold Photobucket to Seattle mobile imaging startup Ontela. Ontela then renamed itself Photobucket Inc. and continues to operate as Photobucket.

In 2011, Photobucket became the default photo sharing platform for Twitter. At that time, according to a report by Sysomos, 2.25M images were shared on Twitter daily, which accounted for 1.25% of all Tweets posted.

On November 15, 2012, Photobucket announced the availability of "Photobucket Stories" which enables the user to combine photos, videos, and text into complete, sharable narratives.

On June 28, 2017, Photobucket changed its Terms of Use regarding free accounts and third party hosting (hosting on forums, eBay, etc.). Only the most expensive plan, at US$399.99 per year, permitted third party hosting and linking to forums.

In 2017, Denver Better Business Bureau gave the company an "F" rating, the worst they issue, citing fifteen complaints related to the change in terms and no response from the company. The company is not BBB-Accredited.

On May 17, 2018, Photobucket introduced new plans, including US$24.99/year that included 3rd party hosted images.

In 2019, they introduced two plans that include third party hosted images, US$29.99/year with 2 GB or US$69.99/year with 20 GB. Effective June 1, 2019, free Photobucket and the "beginner" paid plan accounts were restricted to a hosting bandwidth of 25 MB per month. Free accounts who use more than 25 MB of bandwidth will have all of their hosted photos watermarked and blurred.

On December 11, 2024, a class-action lawsuit was filed against Photobucket after the company changed its privacy policy to allow Photobucket to sell user's photos to companies training AI models. The lawsuit alleges that Photobucket violated privacy laws in California, New York, and Illinois by using the photos without obtaining user consent, forcing users to agree to Photobucket's new privacy policy to delete their accounts, using sensitive geolocation and biometric data in the training data, and violating intellectual property laws.

Features

Photobucket offers subscription-based accounts. Photobucket supports video uploads of 500 MB or less, and 10 minutes or less. The following video file types are supported: 3g2, 3gp, 3gp2, 3gpp, avi, divx, flv, gif, mov, mp4, mpeg4, mpg4, mpeg, mpg, m4v, and wmv. All video files are converted to mp4 format after uploading.

On February 6, 2013, Photobucket announced a partnership with Aviary, an image editing application suite.

Photobucket has three privacy options for albums: public, private, and password-protected privacy. Only public albums display in Photobucket or web search search results. Photobucket does not allow sexually explicit or objectionable public content.

Fuskering

Although it is possible to set Photobucket albums to "private", this does not prevent the photos within being accessed by someone who knows or can guess the URL. Programs called fuskers exist, which can test for likely photo URLs. This has led to "private" photos on Photobucket being downloaded and distributed elsewhere on the Internet without the consent of their uploaders.

References

References

1. "2% of U.S. Internet Traffic goes through Photobucket".
2. "PhotoBucket Closes $10.5M From Trinity Ventures".
3. "It's Official: Ontela Bought Photobucket from News Corp.".
4. "Photobucket's bizarre emails are the last straw for many people".
5. "Photobucket.com, Inc. {{!}} Complaints {{!}} Better Business Bureau® Profile".
6. Kenseth, Lars. "All the Urgent Messages I Have Received from Photobucket".
7. (2018-12-13). "Photobucket: From Rise of Fame to Breaking Billions of Photos to Present Day".
8. Lee, Dami. (2019-06-24). "Photobucket still has your photos, and it wants you to come back".
9. "2% of U.S. Internet Traffic goes through Photobucket".
10. "PhotoBucket Closes $10.5M From Trinity Ventures".
11. "It's Official: Ontela Bought Photobucket from News Corp.".
12. Kiss, Jemima. (June 1, 2011). "Photobucket: Twitter's surprise new partner for photo-sharing tool". The Guardian.
13. (June 2, 2011). "How People Currently Share Pictures On Twitter". [[Sysomos]].
14. "Photobucket Unveils "Stories" Feature for Creating Lasting Multimedia Narratives".
15. "Photobucket - Photo and image hosting, free photo galleries, photo editing".
16. "Photobucket subscription pricing 2019".
17. "Denver Business Journal: BBB issues warning about Photobucket".
18. "Beginner Plan".
19. "Beginner + and Intermediate Plans".
20. "Photobucket Plans".
21. "Photobucket is going to start blurring/watermarking pics".
22. Belanger, Ashley. (2024-12-11). "Photobucket opted inactive users into privacy nightmare, lawsuit says".
23. Riley, Tonya. "Photobucket Sued for Training AI With Photos Without Consent".
24. "Photobucket offers subscription based accounts".
25. "Photobucket.com Terms of Use".
26. Read, Max. "Ladies: 8,000 Creeps on Reddit Are Sharing the Nude Photos You Posted to Photobucket".
27. Notopoulos, Katie. "The Dark Art Of "Fusking"".