If you used Photobucket as I did and put pics into posts, you undoubtedly noticed those pics are no longer visible? That's because PB no longer hosts 3rd party pics unless you UPGRADE for a very hefty fee.

When the first did it you still had the OPTION to download YOUR pics to your computer, but they ELIMINATED that feature. In essence, they are holding YOUR pictures hostage.

You could recover your pics ONE by ONE by posting them in a folder like you would a post, but who wants to do that.
I spent hours last night and this morning trying workarounds from tech websites to BULK DOWNLOAD our pics but none of them worked for me. Very complicated unless your real tech savvy.

I'm nothing if not PERSISTENT and I finally found an EASY and FREE way to BULK download your pics.
Download the FREE version of this:
  (You need to Login or Register

Once installed, open it up. You'll see a panel that says LinkGrabber, click to open it.

Go to your PB pics/albums and click on one pic, you'll see a GREEN arrow. On the top right you see SELECT ALL hit that and every pic will have a GREEN arrow.

You work your way thru ALL the pics/albums the same way. At the bottom, you'll see a bar that says LINKS, click on that and you'll see all the link options. Click on DIRECT, it will highlight, then COPY it and PASTE it into the LINKGRABBER.

You'll see ALL the image codes for ALL your pics appear. Then hit DOWNLOAD and you see them download one by one.

When the download is finished they'll ask you where you want to SAVE them?
Simple and easy, even a NEANDERTHAL like me could do it with a little patience and persistence.

Hope this helps someone IF you have the same problem?

Thanks for the info, ST!  It'll come in handy if I discover I loaded pics on PhotoBucket that I didn't keep on my computer at home.  There could be a few, I suppose.

Going forward, your tip re: IMGUR will come in handy, for sure.

Thanks!

Jimbo   8-)

I noticed recently tha PB allows 3rd party free hosting but there’s a catch. Your pic will have the PB logo in it and it’s not small like the TV networks do.

Jimbo wrote on Mar 17^th, 2019 at 5:20pm:

Thanks for the info, ST!  It'll come in handy if I discover I loaded pics on PhotoBucket that I didn't keep on my computer at home.  There could be a few, I suppose. Going forward, your tip re: IMGUR will come in handy, for sure. Thanks! Jimbo   8-)

I still had most of my pics backed-up on my hard drive BUT it really stuck in my craw that PB had made it IMPOSSIBLE by conventional means to get BACK your own pics.

I think they realized that paying something like $400 a year for FULL access wasn't going to fly for MOST users after people started DOWNLOADING their pics and stopped UPLOADING them.

They DELETED that option to try and cajole people into paying that hefty fee.

  I'm going to keep that JDowdloader on my computer in the event IMGUR does the same thing down the road?