Andrew, I for one am not going to do that, okay? What's "best" for you isn't best for everybody.
Besides, for those who want to migrate their photos to forum storage from Photobucket, the same script/SQL query could be written to do that as well, so, lets not make the script suggestion into a problem. Choice is a good thing.
Adev, sounds great, if that's a solution that Eric wants to use to resolve the issue on MM.
Incidentally, my photo links were just dropped by Photobucket too. I had downloaded my albums already, and now I'm in the process of removing all of my content from Photobucket and deleting my membership account there.
My lathe building thread has one final remaining photo visible -- it was a test to see if my own hosting would work for this forum and it does.
BTW, Sparky, as I mentioned earlier, when downloading albums from PhotoBucket I noticed the download originated from a Google server, not Photobucket. That says something to me about their involvement in this debacle.
It will be very interesting to see if Google's purchase, Youtube, goes the same way some day in the future. Do we plan on locally storing and serving videos on the forum, too?
ps. Ironic ......Photobucket still provides a hot link for any photo you upload so you can paste it inline somewhere else. Yet doing that "breaks your user agreement". Linking images was encouraged from the start.
Ya know if PB had said something reasonable -- like a $30/yr fee, maybe people could understand, but nearly $400/yr and shutting down all links, with a payment message? Let's coin a new term for that behavior: ransom linking.