People looking at older posts and threads would have noticed many broken image links to Photobucket.  Photobucket was used on here in the early days when direct photo uploading wasn't possible.  It was a good and free service for quite a few years back then.  But then they decided to try and ransom people $400 per year to link their photos to external sites, and all their existing linked images now display the infamous ransom message.

thanks very much for taking the time to do that, some very good photos in there, RATLY.

What is the best alternative to Photobucket that is free and works the same way

I've been using

https://postimages.org/

works fine