Easy to use interface that is great for beginning freelancers but might have kicked the bucket by restricting useful features to higher tier accounts
November 25, 2021

Easy to use interface that is great for beginning freelancers but might have kicked the bucket by restricting useful features to higher tier accounts

Shion Song | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Photobucket

When bandwidth was a lot more expensive, Photobucket, with [its] generous bandwidth capacity, allowed us to keep our cloud hosting bandwidth usages under control and offload samples of work and other media onto Photobucket servers. This was especially useful as the business was just getting started, and we needed to ensure our expenses were streamlined as much as possible.

Pros

  • Photo specific-features and better UI for sharing photos vs. other cloud storage providers
  • Unlimited plan is still generously priced
  • the "1" in the classic 3-2-1 backup plan that is easy to use
  • Good for beginners

Cons

  • Plans are awkwardly priced compared to competitors
  • [In my opinion,] made shady practices in the past forcing users to their premium plans
  • Offsite storage of media that is closer to a "set it, forget it" vs providers like AWS
  • While we don't need it, unlimited storage can be attractive to some
  • No maintenance necessary since it usually "just works"
  • Saves time for quickly sharing content to clients
[I] also had an ImageEvent premium account, and it was far easier to manage images in Photobucket. ImageEvent's UI is very dated, and its feature set has largely remained stagnant. Photobucket has evolved over the past decade and offers a clean enough user interface to quickly accomplish what needs to be done.

Do you think Photobucket delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Photobucket's feature set?

Yes

Did Photobucket live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of Photobucket go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Photobucket again?

No

Photobucket used to be great in the late 2000s to early 2010s. Even free account holders could enjoy many of its features and quickly and easily share photos. However, these days there are so many better alternatives, while Photobucket's feature set has been limited to premium and higher-tier accounts. Cloud storage providers now offer generous bandwidth caps, so offloading media is a thing of the past - even for the most budget-conscious freelancers. Photo-specific features provided by these service providers are constantly improving. [...] As time goes on, the list of reasons that used to differentiate Photobucket grows thin given their [in my experience,] shady past in holding photos hostage without a premium plan, I can no longer recommend this service. Price-wise, only their unlimited plan is worth considering since, for capped storage plans, the usual suspects (Apple iCloud, Google Photos, Amazon Prime) have them beat. Likewise, Photobucket's built-in image editor is very convenient for making basic changes without having to fire up a separate photo editor

Photobucket Feature Ratings

Versioning
Not Rated
Video files
Not Rated
Audio files
Not Rated
Document collaboration
Not Rated
Access control
7
File search
7
Device sync
Not Rated
User and role management
Not Rated
File organization
Not Rated
Device management
Not Rated
Performance
6
Reliability
7
Storage Reports
9

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