Photobucket just stuck it to everyone.

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Photobucket is cracking down on people embedding on third-party websites images it hosts, until now, for free.

The photo-slinging internet elder now says that anyone who wants to use its service to display photos it hosts on other pages – such as signature banners in forum posts – will now need to open up their wallets and plop down $399.99 a year for a subscription plan.

The new policy will be particularly annoying to longtime users who have relied on Photobucket's 14-year-old service to host the images they use to place images on forums or in blog posts.

Cheaper plans, including the free account option, will no longer have an option to allow third-party hosting.

The change of heart was quietly introduced by Photobucket earlier this week as an update to its terms of service.

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Not only is that very expensive, it means existing Photobucket accounts on lower subscriptions tiers will have any embedded images they've created in the past cease to work. Considering Photobucket has been around since 2003 and hosts over 10 billion images, that's potentially millions of embedded images across the Internet being broken thanks to a policy change. Here's just one example of how this change impacts a forum thread.

The worst part of this debacle, according to Ghacks.net, is the fact Photobucket users were apparently given no warning of the change. The subscription features simply changed, and images stopped loading without explanation.

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