Photobucket has recently changed the terms of thousands of shopping site images by demanding a payment that some have compared to a ransomware.

Amazon, Ebay and other forums and blogs have been affected, causing the ‘goods’ to be removed from the sites.

The photo hosting service, which has over 100 million customers and over 15 billion images on its servers, has been accused of holding a ‘ransom’, because of introducing a charge for images hosted on its platform.

According to the BBC, those who wish to use the website for ‘third party hosting’ will face a social media ‘backlash’ as payback, and Photobucket will have to pay a US$399 fee.

Amateur Photographer magazine Editor, Nigel Atherton said: “There’s a lot of websites out there looking for advertising, and there’s a finite amount of advertising spending to go round, and any photo gallery and storage site like this that relies on ads to offer a free service can only continue to do so if they have enough money coming in.”

“So, if you put all your photos into any site or app like this where it’s not clear how they are going to continue financing their business, then it could come back and bite you at some point in the future,” he added.

Many Photobucket users were unaware of the financial change.

Written by Leah Alger