Photobucket, a very popular photo hosting service used by over 100 million registered users, recently made changes to their business model and angered a lot of their users in the process.
Since 2003 the service allowed you to upload/host images for free on their servers and embed them elsewhere (like in a forum or on your blog). However the new change to its terms of service now blocks third-party image hosting meaning that images don’t load outside of Photobucket’s own site.
This resulted in numerous images across the web being replaced with a placeholder image stating that in order to get the images to display properly again it is required to upgrade your account to their Plus 500 subscription plan (costing $39.99/month or $399.99/year).
If you have been affected and don’t want to pay the upgrade then unfortunately the only option is replacing those images. You can download your images from Photobucket by logging into your account, going to the library page, viewing a photo and downloading.
Some people are moving to alternative photo hosting sites including Imgur, TinyPic and Flickr, however I don’t recommend that.
Ideally, you want to host your blog images and graphics directly on your blog platform (WordPress, Squarespace or Blogger). This is easy to do when adding images to posts or pages, but what if you want to add an image to your sidebar or widgets in your footer?
How To Host Blog Images/Graphics Directly on Blogger
On Blogger, create a new Post or Page. We won’t be saving it so it’s not necessary to name it anything. In the editors toolbar switch to HTML mode, click the Add Image icon and upload your image. Choose None under Image Alignment and Original Size under Image Size (read why that’s important here). A snippet of code will be inserted, this is the image code and wrapped around it is a link to that image.
<a href="IMAGE LINK" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="IMAGE SOURCE URL" data-original-width="750" data-original-height="1285" alt="DESCRIPTION"/></a>You can change the href URL or remove the a tags altogether so all that is left is the image tag line. You can now use this to display that image elsewhere on your blog.
<img border="0" src="IMAGE SOURCE URL" data-original-width="750" data-original-height="1285" alt="DESCRIPTION"/>How To Host Blog Images/Graphics Directly on WordPress
WordPress make it really simple to organise images with a Media Library. While logged in to your blog, click Media in the Admin Menu on the left and Add New. Upload your image and click to open it. Now you can copy the image URL and use that in this simple piece of image code to display it elsewhere on your site.
<img src="IMAGE SOURCE URL" alt="DESCRIPTION"/>If you want that image to be a link, you can use the following
<a href="IMAGE LINK"><img src="IMAGE SOURCE URL" alt="DESCRIPTION"/></a>
8 responses to “Alternatives to Photobucket for hosting your blog photos and how to store images directly on Blogger and WordPress”
Thank you so much!
Uploaded images on Blogger automatically save to a Google Picassa album, you don’t have to get code and insert it into the html. The only way you lose an image is if you delete it from Picassa. If you do want to insert html for an image you can also easily drop in an image html on the same dropdown menu as an upload right from the compose page. You do not have to go to the html.editing page.
Hello. This is if people want to host images/graphics directly on the platform to use in a gadget or for a special instance (like about image in sidebar, post signature graphic or for an image gallery for example). I also recommend people, if capable, to write posts in HTML mode as it’s a better way of formatting posts and to clean up the default HTML that Blogger creates when you insert an image.
Thanks so much. This was very helpful!
Thank you so much for sharing. I can always count on you to solve the most current problems and post the most relevant tutorials about both blogger and wordpress.
xo
This is awesome! Thank you!
Thank you for the Information.
thanks for suggestion