It's old news

Photobucket blighted the internet a few years ago by changing their terms and essentially holding the images from free hosting accounts for ransom. Pay the new membership fees or have your images go away. Forum threads from years of archived discussions got neutered of their images.

The situation sucks, and thousands of folks just walked away from Photobucket. The damage is done and it's all over the web.

It can happen with any hosting site that either goes bust and vaporizes, or does something similar to what PB did.
Choose your photo hosting site carefully.
I use Flickr, and it's basically held together fine through the years. Hopefully it'll continue to work.