I broke down and paid for photobucket and imageshack, so I could keep my images as safe a possible. It's not worth the hassle of loosing them, although anything can happen and at least I don't have to worry about bandwidth any more. In the long run, it's worth it if you have a lot of images and I guess I do. I have never kept any images on my PC, not the ones I post, so if PB and IS loose them, they will be gone forever...
I switched to Flickr because I hated PhotoBucket. But then I ended up rolling my own and so far I’m happy with it. Bandwidth is dirt cheap. It’s not scarce. There’s no way these photo sites should ransom your photos over bandwidth. Surely there are better ways for them to monetize their businesses.
With the photobucket upgrade, can you get the stats for which sites are using which photos like they used to have? They used to show you some of these details even for free, but it appears to have gone?
I actually rather like Photobucket. It’s not my primary goto for photos as I host most on my colocated macmini, but for forums I use it frequently, and I do use it for uploading scaled pictures when traveling. I’ve never understood why people get upset when a company limits services that it offers for free.
Photobucket has been going downhill fast for most of 2013. Plus, there are tons of free image hosting websites, and Photobucket is pretty bad compared to the best out there:
Unfortunately PB is no better when you give them money. I've been paying them for around 7 years. No issues till this year when they rammed the new (and far worse) interface down everyone's throats. It is heavily dependent on Flash which is never good - and stats are no longer available at all. They won't be seeing any more money from me.
I never could get along with imageshack - it just seemed far too confusing to me. Colocation is far too expensive for most folks who don't have other uses for it. Must fiddle with Flickr which has also been messed up to make it "better".
I set up an abload.de account but haven't used it yet.