Photobucket

History

Photobucket 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.

In June 2010, Photobucket was named in the Lead411's Hottest Seattle Companies list.

Twitter partnership

Twitter announced in June 2011 that Photobucket will become the default photo sharing platform for Twitter. According to a report by Sysomos, 2.25M images are shared on Twitter daily, which accounts for 1.25% of all Tweets posted. Just before the announcement, TwitPic and Yfrog were the leading photo-sharing services.

Accounts

Photobucket offers free and subscription based (Plus) accounts. Free account users receive 2 GB of storage for photo and video uploads, 10 GB of transfers (which they call "bandwidth") per month for sharing and linking, and unlimited access to Photobucket’s editing, slideshow, and Story features. "Plus" accounts are structured into storage tiers and offer unlimited bandwidth, use of site features, and an advertisement free experience.

The following describes Plus subscription pricing as of October 2016:

Full resolution image backup

Photobucket stores the original photo file taken directly from a phone, camera, or computer without compression or resizing. The following image file types are supported by Photobucket: gif, jpg, jpeg, png, bmp (bmp files are converted into png files). Many in the photography community, however, have lamented that .raw files are not supported.

Videos

Photobucket supports video uploads of 500 MB or less, and 10 minutes or less. The following video file types are supported: 3g2, 3gp, 3gp2, 3gpp, avi, divx, flv, gif, mov, mp4, mpeg4, mpg4, mpeg, mpg, m4v, and wmv. All video files are converted to mp4 format after uploading.

Sharing

The service allows sharing of photos, videos, and albums by email, instant messaging, mobile phone, and social media.

Photobucket stories

On November 15, 2012, Photobucket announced the availability of "Photobucket Stories" which provides users with an easy new way to combine photos, videos, and text into complete, sharable narratives. Photobucket Stories allows users to easily create and collaborate on living stories by inviting friends and family to contribute photos, video and text to a single, sharable canvas. Once Stories are created, they are easily embeddable on blogs, personal, and brand sites, and can be shared among friends from mobile devices or across Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

Editing

On February 6, 2013 Photobucket announced a partnership with Aviary, an image editing application suite.

Privacy

Photobucket has three privacy options for albums: public, private, and password protected privacy.

Public

When an album is public:

Private

When an album is private:

Password protected privacy

When an album is password protected:

Fuskering

Although it is possible to set Photobucket albums to "private", this does not prevent the photos within being accessed by someone who knows or can guess the URL. Programs called fuskers exist, which can test for likely photo URLs. This has led to "private" photos on Photobucket being downloaded and distributed elsewhere on the Internet without the consent of their uploaders.

Photobucket monitors suspicious activity to track for possible fuskers. However, the easiest way to protect your content is to scramble the links to your photos and videos. Unless users have a need to preserve original file names, Photobucket recommends that users select this option to scramble both past and future uploads.

Since Photobucket does not allow sexually explicit or objectionable content, they may remove content at their discretion due to violations of their terms of service.