I haven't seen anything about this and I use photobucket exclusively. Maybe I'm just not using enough to warrant having to pay for it.
Okay, if you go to Photobucket, log in, and click on "Plans" at the upper right hand corner you will see the various plans. The free one is allowed up to 2GB, the $6 a month allows 52GB, the $10 a month allows 102GB, and the 502GB of picture, video, and .gif storage is $40 a month. I have roughly a thousand pictures and .gifs on Photobucket but because I have been religious about resizing the pics before uploading them; it hasn't been an issue for me yet but I am bumping right up against the 2GB limit for the free service so I am going to delete stuff I haven't used in years.
Here's what you do: Download everything and resize the pictures then upload them at 35k size or so instead of 5 or 10 MB size you're probably using now. A ten MB picture would be equal to 100 pictures that have been downsized to 35k or so and on a webpage it generally looks the same or good enough. Host all videos on YouTube or some other video hosting site. The most important thing to do is get in the habit of resizing your pics down to a 600x800 pixel size so it is both forum, email, and photobucket friendly. I must warn you it will take a while to download your pics and stuff if you are over 500 GB. That's a lot!
Here's a free picture resizing program that will resize batches of pics at one time instead of one at a time. There are other handy free apps there too like renaming camera pics to the date and time. I know this will be a little difficult at first for some people stuck in their way of doing things but in no time you will be running your railroad the right way.
http://www.mihov.com/sw/en/ir.php
You do have one other option on resizing the pics and keeping the pics posted where they are using the same URL. Do it within Photobucket. Warning to the wise though; it will take a lot of time. Then when you save it; save it using the same URL as the original.
It would be handy if we could post a small-size picture here without a 3rd party or even have the forum software resize the picture automagically but I think that would take some serious and expensive programming. It would also mean making the storage capacity that much bigger which I think is already an issue.
By the way 3rd party in this context means you, the forum, and wherever it is you store the picture for hosting. To the hosting site like Photobucket; this forum would be the 3rd party.