Users are calling it “extortion” and a “ransom demand”; photo-sharing service Photobucket has updated its terms of service, and in doing so has removed thousands of images on online retail sites including Amazon and eBay.

Photobucket is now charging users a $399 (£309) annual fee to embed images on third-party sites. With many members caught unaware by the change, thousands of pages on retail platforms, along with blogs and other sites, have had their images replaced with a placeholder informing users to update their account.

Photobucket has said that staff are “trying our best to respond quickly” to user feedback and questions, but the firm’s social media has been flooded with users voicing their displeasure at the changes, and promising to leave the company for alternative hosting services.

Photobucket, which was founded in 2003, has more than 100m customers and more than 15bn images on its servers. However, many small retailers, attracted to the service due to its free hosting that enabled images to be embedded on multiple platforms, are now abandoning the company due to the change.

Many users are complaining the changes were made with no notice. Photobucket did publish a short note, consisting of just three sentences, with a link to the new Terms of Service on 26 June, but the new charge was not made explicit in the warning, and users were expected to spot the changes in the 3,400+ word Terms of Service.

Update: This story originally included Etsy in the retail platforms affected by Photobuckets changes, but we have since confirmed that Etsy was unaffected and uses internally hosted web servers and cloud based hosting for all user images.

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