The most popular image on the web has suddenly become: . . I'd never pay Photobucket $400 per year. If I didn't trust another free host to not not turn around and do a "Photobucket" someday, I'd possibly consider paying Microsoft $69.99 per year for an "Office 365 Personal" subscription and get 1 TB of cloud storage that I could use for other things besides photos. . I'm pretty sure you can hot link. They offer you embed code:

There's a few reasons for using one of the photo sharing sites. The OP asked about Craigslist and while I believe they have changed the rules, at one point Craigslist only allowed users to upload (to their servers) four, fairly small (~640x480) images. Depending on what you're selling, have more, higher resolution photos could be an advantage. The seller needed to know some basic HTML and have some way of hosting the photos. Certainly bigger sites, like GardenWeb, allow users to upload files directly to their servers but some smaller sites don't allow that in order to contain costs. The other advantages of an online service is a means of backup, the ability to share photos, and access from just about anywhere.

A few years ago I lost a lot of photos due to a computer that crashed and burned. Not even the geeks could salvage any of my files. A good reminder to perform backups regularly. Fortunately, most of those photos had been stored on Photobucket. Now that Photobucket isn't playing nice, I'm in the process of saving those photos to my computer. Once I have them all saved, I will back them up on a flash drive. Never again, will I rely on an outside source to save something important to me like photos or documents. Lessons learned: Back up your files regularly on an external device. Don't depend on any of these internet companies for these types of services. You never know when they will change their terms of service, be sold to someone else or just plain go out of business. I understand that Photobucket is a business and that they exist to make money. But the way they did this is really unprofessional. They could have made this change apply to future third party linking rather than break all these existing links. So many people have been affected by this change and all this posting history has been lost. They could have announced this change a few months ago to give people a chance to prepare. I read earlier in this thread that one of you received an email notification, but I haven't received a thing. Judging by how many people are reacting with surprise and shock, I'm assuming a lot of them didn't receive any type of notice either. I also think that $399 a year is a rather excessive amount to charge for their services. Bye, bye, Photobucket.

There was this discussion back in July