wpwar11
When trying to post a picture from photobucket I get “photo is currently unabailable”. What am I doing wrong? I paid a subscription on photobucket just to perform this task.
It may have been a server issue on Photobucket's side.
What mississippivol is referring to, is the period from 2016 untill perhaps a year ago.
Photobucket originally offered a schedule of accounts, from a free account with a limited amount of storage, up through 3 or 4 paid accounts, that offered increasing amounts of storage. Each account allowed you to use links to your images stored at Photobucket, for use elsewhere in the Internet (like posting here, for example).
In my own case, I had a free account, used up the available space-I don't recall how much it was-and I decided to take the basic paid subscription, which was $49.99 a year. That got me a lot more additional storage space.
In 2016, though, someone at Photobucket got the bright idea to stop allowing linking for any but their most expensive account, which was $499.99 per year. You could store images for less, but those cheaper accounts no longer included linking your images. If you search the forum, you'll find discussions about this. And you may also see images that represent the fallout from that decision. They show the same message you got.
People who had free accounts were screwed right at that moment. Anyone whose sole copy of his files was stored at Photobucket was stuck. Either pay and get access to those files, or don't pay, and say good-bye to those files. Most people made efforts to download copies before the deadline.
For those of us with paid accounts, we had to the end of our current paid subscriptions. Mine ran out at the end of 2017, I think. For me, it wasn't a problem, since I store my files locally, and only used Photobucket to link images. But it was a PITA nevertheless.
I noticed earlier this year that Photobucket has since walked back that disastrous move, and once again offers linking images with every level of subscription. I imagine they were bleeding revenue, from customers they screwed, and from competition with other sites and means of storage.
I don't know of anyone who had an account back then, who has gone back to them. After my subscription expired, I switched over to Postimage, by the way, another free hosting site. But amusingly, I still get email notifications from Photobucket when someone clicks to follow my old albums there.