Photobucket

Share your special moments, or keep them private.

Who can see your photos is entirely up to you and it’s easy to post to your favorite social media sites from any device.

Photobucket is an American image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community. Photobucket hosts more than 10 billion images from 100 million registered members. Photobucket’s headquarters are in Denver, Colorado. The website 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.

Photobucket is widely used for both personal and business purposes. Links from personal Photobucket accounts are often used for avatars displayed on Internet forums, storage of videos, embedding on blogs, and distribution in social networks. Images hosted on Photobucket are frequently linked to online businesses, online auctions, and classified advertisement websites like eBay and Craigslist.

In late June 2017, Photobucket dropped its free hosting service, and started requiring a US$99 annual subscription to allow external linking to all hosted images, or a US$399 annual subscription to allow the embedding of images on third-party websites, such as personal blogs and forums. This policy change, enacted with minimal advance notice, has been highly controversial. As a result, users who previously relied on Photobucket to freely host content embedded on forums, blogs, and websites must either pay the annual subscription (previously there was no charge), or switch to another 3rd party server (many of which are also shutting down or going to pay services; Tinypic, which remained free under Photobucket ownership, was shut down in 2019) and recreate every link (potentially thousands) for every photo previously linked to Photobucket, or have their photos replaced with an account upgrade notice.

Embed your photos anywhere.

Embed your photos anywhere. More than 90 million users have trusted photobucket® with over 15 billion personal images since 2004. Our members rely on us to host their images on social networks in an instant & with ease. With photobucket® hosting, there’s no need to keep uploading the same image over and over to different forums, websites, blogs, or marketplaces. Use our simple embed link to copy and share to your favorite sites.

Make your photos amazing.

Make your photos amazing. Add brilliant filters, stickers, cropping, and annotations to make any image become the image it was meant to be. Get the I-spent-hours-on-this look in seconds. Start unleashing your creativity today!

We value your privacy.

We value your privacy. With our intuitive privacy settings, photobucket® gives you peace of mind in knowing that you are in control of who can see your albums & images when sharing with friends or family. With photobucket’s private encryption and removal of EXIF data on downloads, you will never have to worry about losing control of your images or personal information.

Store your photos at their best quality.

Store your photos at their best quality. Each image you take represents a split-second in time that can never be recaptured. That image has the potential to shape memories for generations to come. We believe that choosing to store your memory in the cloud shouldn’t compromise the archival quality of your image.

Photobucket Hosting

Photobucket uses two different programming languages and a multimedia software suite to deliver services to members. They are:

The Java programming language, which is a popular, robust computing language humans can read. The Java language allows programmers to create complex Web applications using a comparatively simple language. After writing the application, the programmers must run their program through a compiler, which converts the code from the Java language into a machine-readable format. Primarily, programmers use the Java programming language to create applications designed for network computing. Photobucket encourages all members to enable Java on their respective Web browsers — otherwise, the Web site might not work for those users. Java does the heavy lifting in the Photobucket infrastructure.

Photobucket also uses the JavaScript programming language. JavaScript and Java are not the same thing. The JavaScript language is a client-side scripting language (CSL). That means a JavaScript application consists of several lines of code embedded in a Web page. The application runs within Internet browsers, which have interpreters that detect and execute JavaScript applications (apps). JavaScript apps tend to be relatively simple compared to programs built in other computing languages. With most Internet browsers, the user can choose to enable or disable JavaScript — so Photobucket users should check their settings if they experience problems with the service.

The third element Photobucket uses is Adobe Flash. Flash is a multimedia software suite designed to create animation and Web applications. Photobucket’s interface uses Flash to make the user experience interactive and intuitive.

You can think of Java as the platform upon which the Flash and JavaScript components stand. Paired with the HTML code for Photobucket’s Web site, these three elements are what make Photobucket work.

Behind the scenes, Photobucket stores images and video on a network of servers and data storage devices housed in various facilities in Colorado. Photobucket partners with companies like Data393, and Switch and Data, which provide data center facilities. A data center is a specialized warehouse — its design incorporates the cooling, bandwidth, networking and power capabilities necessary to keep a large network of physical machines running. Photobucket uses its own hardware and software in these data centers.

Photobucket Accounts

A Photobucket Meez is an avatar — an animated representation of a Photobucket member.

(HOWSTUFFWORKS SCREENSHOT, NO CREDIT)

The basic Photobucket account is free of charge and comes with the following:

One gigabyte (GB) of storage space
The ability to upload videos of up to 5 minutes in length
25 GB of bandwidth each month
Access to Adobe Premiere Express for Web-based photo editing
The option to create a personal avatar called a Meez
Options to transfer digital images to physical products (which you must purchase)

For $39.95 per year, users can upgrade to a Pro account. Pro accounts have all the features of a basic account as well as:

10 GB of storage space
The ability to upload 10-minute long videos
Unmetered (but not necessarily unlimited) bandwidth
File transfer protocol (FTP) upload access
The option to upload high resolution images
Support for Flash files (.swf files)
A 10 percent discount on items from the Photobucket store
Premium technical support

Photobucket allows users to create direct links on Web pages to pictures in their accounts. But that means every time someone loads the respective Web page, Photobucket must send the image data to the appropriate server. As more people view the Web page, Photobucket has to send more image data across the Internet. Most Internet service providers (ISPs) charge individuals or companies for heavy use of their networks. That’s why Photobucket institutes bandwidth caps — to reduce the possibility of having to pay fees for its direct links.

Whether you have a basic or a pro account, you can choose to make your account public or private. Anyone can view pictures posted in a public account, which is the default setting on all user accounts. If you have a public account and label a photo with a tag, anyone searching Photobucket for that tag can see your image.

Photobucket gives members the option to share photos through direct links or photo albums.

(HOWSTUFFWORKS SCREENSHOT, NO CREDIT)

Private accounts are different. Users with a private account can choose who can view the images and videos they’ve stored. Private account members create a guest password that they can share with trusted friends and family. Whether an account is public or private, the user must still adhere to Photobucket’s terms of use. Just because an account is private doesn’t mean the account holder can upload photos prohibited for public accounts.

If you decide you no longer want your Photobucket account, you can cancel it. Free account holders can cancel an account through their account options on their profile page. Users must enter a reason for deleting the account and include a security code to prevent fraudulent deletions. After 48 hours, Photobucket deletes the account and all the media stored there — there are no backups, so it’s important to save all media locally.

Pro account holders have to contact the Photobucket support team in order to cancel an account. Only by contacting the team can a user ensure that Photobucket doesn’t automatically bill the user.