Sucks but you get what you pay for. I also signed for up imgur, but also noticed Google Photos work as well.
I agree you get what you pay for (why did my $50 waders leak?
) - but it really sucks to be told you now have to pay for something you have been getting for free for as long as you remember - and can get for free from so many other places.
People have spent good time curating and posting their images in good faith that they would be there in the future - then to have them change to a very costly service with little to no notice to users is crap. I've been rifling through old posts on FWR lately and they are filled with these shitty image messages - basically rendering the posted comments useless. Should someone like HOOK (sorry to name names - but you have many awesome posts it would be a shame to lose) have to go shell out $400 or spend countless hours moving all his images to a new site, then re-link everything just so we can see the wealth of info he has shared with us?
I can see possibly charging the Etsy/Amazon/Ebay crowd for this service - but boning literally 100,000,000+ users will be the death of Photobucket (hopefully).
I love Imgur - but Google photos sounds like a good idea. They are probably the last ones that will start charging for this type of stuff.