If someone else noticed and reported it I missed that, but this is the message I found today:
So since I currently have 3627 pictures on flickr, starting in 2012, almost all posted as inline pics on BLF, I will have to consider paying (have not found out how much yet) or I and BLF will loose most of my BLF picture history.
Oh boy 
I hope Imgur doesn’t take the same way too 
EDIT: I guess a PRO account is around $50 per year…
It seems that the bill will be 4.49 euro per month, so that is about 80 dollar per year. I will have to think about that, this is a hobby you know 
This is one reason why I have multiple free accounts with smaller amounts of images for forum pics, not flickr though.
I suppose most will go this way eventually.
I’m not looking forward to moving thousands of pictures to a couple of new flickr accounts, if at all flickr will allow that.
It started with Boto*ucket and now it is flicker’s turn.
I’m sorry for you but we all knew it was coming … sooner or later.
In the end someone has to pay for services rendered.
Because there is no such thing as a free lunch.
I just don’t see them giving an option to move files around between accounts and keep the same link and without the link being maintained exactly its a moot point, you’d have to individually edit posts…
I would like to be the first to offer to donate a couple month’s worth of hosting fees, your testing is so invaluable to us I’ll pony up $15 to the cause. Get a few other people to jump in too and you should be good for a few years at least.
Imgur is ad-supported by a several million user community that is similar to reddit.
Out of all the image hosting sites that exist it’s the one with least chance of going south.
Honestly not surprised flickr is doing the same that photobucket did, there’s no money to be had from serving images through hotlinks.
For casual users, it’s still free. If you’re a pro and displaying thousands of images (no size limit per file) then you pay, as it should be.
Photobucket charged you for hosting even a single image.
I’m not complaining.
Chris
I use information from your tests, I can contribute another $10 - 15 to the cause, anyone else?
I’m not complaining, not for myself, nor for most of the people around me. But a few people, like djozz, generate mountains of useful information and have all the characteristics of a pro, except the income of a pro. These are the people who fall between two stools.
$metoo. Not in $$$, but in €€€
It is not that I do not have the money. So I would not accept money for my flickr account. I spend more than a thousand dollar per year on this hobby. But thusfar every dollar of that is spent on fun doing the hobby, paying for storing pictures to be able to show them on BLF is not one penny of fun (and even less if others pay for that).
I think maybe public fora the way they are organised now with hotlinked images are becoming increasingly a bad place for preserving history. Even if I would pay for a Pro account, the moment I stop with this hobby it will become less and less attractive to pay for that account for the sake of a forum I’m not part of anymore.
Yeah , well worth it . Where and how do I contribute ?
Didn’t Photobucket asking for something ridiculous like $300 per year? And they changed their policy with no advance warning and held ALL your uploaded photos hostage until you paid.
I understand these picture-hosting sites probably aren’t making money and venture capital only goes so far. However, I hope Imgur doesn’t try this. I think $50 per year would be ok if the service worked well. But anything higher wouldn’t be worth it.
Here’s the real issue. The images are already in the aforementioned Flikr account, and already linked in various places over BLF. If djozz won’t commit to keeping his personal account going, and won’t let anyone help pay to do so, then we stand to lose all that valuable content, short of painstakingly moving every file over to another account and re-linking to every post going back several years.
For future postings, I could recommend we get a Flikr Pro account for BLF that all of us could use. Just a few of us pitching in could pay for several years’ worth of subscription. Flikr already said in the text djozz quoted above that hosting for Flikr Pro accounts is unlimited. But that doesn’t help the current situation. So, what do we do?
I will be in trouble if abload tries to pull this garbage.
The site is supported by ads and donations, so all I can do is keep my fingers crossed. 
I think that’s a very good idea, David.
Would be nice too if the image sizes would be limited to 1600 × 1600 pixels to avoid pages taking too long to load and fill up the cache memory to the brim.
(actually 800 × 800 is enough, but sometimes more detail is desired)
But that doesn’t help the current situation.
Djozz’s pictures should be available here, so the price should be paid.
I’m willing to chip in.
But it’s Djozz’s decision.
I’m not surprised. Many years ago I was pro on flikr because the amount of free photos was very limited. Then they raised the amount of free photos to what it currently is, so I stopped being pro. I don’t think I was alone. So I was just waiting for this to happen. I am actually surprised, surprised it took so long.
I stopped paying for Flickr Pro when Yahoo bought them and added that awful banner and let all the features stagnate for years. Much easier to just use imgur for gallery hosting… except imgur ditched the paid model and intentionally made it difficult to host photo galleries by randomly ordering uploads and hiding the thumbnail album view. They don’t want to be your image host, they want you to look at memes and cat photos while viewing ads in their app.