I've been doing some research the last couple days about forum hosting pics, asking other forum owners that do allow forum photo uploads... the $400/yr photobucket is charging now looks pretty cheap in comparison!
A rough guess, all the photos that have been lost here with photobucket, if all of them were hosted here, the cost could be near as high as 10x photobucket's current rate... and who's gonna pay for that???!!!
A possible route is to set up your own website to upload photos & 3rd party link from there to here... which I have discovered some members here are already doing that.
Perhaps they'll chime in with links & cost & how to go about it.
Or go with another FREE image host to 3rd party link, ride the wave to it flat lines & then start over again somewhere else.
There's no easy quick cheap fix out of this mess.