Harvey / 19 June 2025 / Categories: Product and Brands, Education, Internet, Web Companies, Useful Guides

Want to know what’s in your Photobucket account before you pay them to reactivate?

Here’s what I found out

For me this is the point of being on Poopsnoop to help the community with information and discovery. If I’d known this yesterday about Photobucket it would have saved me a lot of time.

So here’s what happened.

For a while now I’ve been receiving emails saying my Photobucket account was being deleted if I didn’t act and the images and videos held there would potentially be lost. I didn’t do anything for ages mainly because I couldn’t really remember setting up the account or actually using it to share store photos. So my common sense told me they didn’t have anything I actually wanted.

That said when I got an email saying my account from 2010 was about to be lost forever I was curious what might be in there from 15 years ago and decided to click through and see what was going on.

I hit a payment screen. Pay us £5 and you get to reactivate the account I didn’t remember ever using or needing and then a set amount every month, cancel anytime.

It made me wonder how clever it was and how many people pay the five quid to find out there’s nothing they actually want or need in there in the first place.

All I wanted to do was check out what they had before deciding if I wanted it back, my images, in the most part. As I couldn’t remember ever using Photobucket, I’ve used Dropbox to share large image files more I wasn’t signing up so I started checking out online what other people had done in the same situation.

And Tadah I found a work around.

Thanks to another person who had the same experience and shared how you get to see your images without paying before you decide if you want to reactivate your account or not.

You take the plunge and delete or deactivate your account. The information I found said if you go through the 5 or 6 prompts to deactivate delete your account you’ll be offered a 7 days free trial of Photobucket where you can view all your images and videos stored there.

This didn’t happen for me but what did happen I got an email link to download a zip file of everything I had stored in Photobucket.

As it turned out I hadn’t really used the application and what was in there I was right I wasn’t really bothered about saving. Most of the images I either already had copies of or didn’t need or want.

The pay £5 screen you cannot bypass unless you opt to delete is the problem when they have you by the short and curly not knowing what they’ve got and scared you might lose images you might want from in my case 15 years ago.

When I thought about all those £5 added together, Photobucket has over 100 million registered members, I thought it was an absolute genius way to make a boat load of money getting people to pay for something they don’t actually, want need or have ever really used in the past.

If photo bucket are sending you emails saying your account is being deleted and suggesting you reactivate to save content you didn’t know they had, go ahead and hit delete. Before the account is deleted they’ll send you a zip file of everything in there.

If you are like me you’ll discover it’s a few photos you’ve already got saved elsewhere or stuff you don’t need and are glad to get rid of.

Kudos to Photobucket what a clever way to get everyone afraid we are about to lose something we want and admittedly paying £5 is a nominal amount, for me five quid is still five quid and it’s all those fine quids together around the world I find distasteful, then they’ve got your credit card and the onus is on you to cancel the account which they Photobucket are banking on you forgetting. Which if you are like me you probably will. I signed up for Apple TV to watch one series and I’ve been paying £8.99 a month for the last four months and haven’t watched anything.

Which reminds me I need to cancel my Apple TV subscription. See how it works.