Links from personal Photobucket accounts were often used for avatars displayed on Internet forums, storage of videos, embedding on blogs, and distribution in social networks.

In December 2009, Fox's parent company, News Corp, sold Photobucket to Seattle mobile imaging startup Ontela.

[3] In late June 2017, Photobucket dropped its free hosting service, and started requiring a US$99 annual subscription to allow external linking to all hosted images, or a US$399 annual subscription to allow the embedding of images on third-party websites, such as personal blogs and forums.

Even years after abandoning free accounts, Photobucket keeps sending email "offers" that variously attempt to cajole or threaten users to switch to the paid plan.

In December 2009, Fox's parent company, News Corp, sold Photobucket to Seattle mobile imaging startup Ontela.

[19] Effective June 1, 2019, free Photobucket and the "beginner" paid plan accounts were restricted to a hosting bandwidth of 25 MB per month.

The lawsuit alleges that Photobucket violated privacy laws in California, New York, and Illinois by using the photos without obtaining user consent, forcing users to agree to Photobucket's new privacy policy to delete their accounts, using sensitive geolocation and biometric data in the training data, and violating intellectual property laws.

The following video file types are supported: 3g2, 3gp, 3gp2, 3gpp, avi, divx, flv, gif, mov, mp4, mpeg4, mpg4, mpeg, mpg, m4v, and wmv.