Sometime around the first week of February I opened Image Shack to host another image for a file I was preparing.  Not wanting lose most of my GEC posts, I clicked on the upgrade button and selected 6 months service.  I was billed $38 USD.  I waited a week or so to cool off before I contacted them with the following message:

I was crestfallen when I read your notice that your hosting service was no longer free.  I am a retired American living in Japan, and I use your service exclusively to host images for my hobby of making KML files, which I usually publish in the Google Earth Community forums.  When I first started entrusting you with my images about six years ago, you promised me free, unlimited storage without, so far as I am aware, reservation.  I felt like a junkie who had been hooked with free samples, although your change in policy is really more like the highhanded way my bank keeps upping the rates on what were once free services, while they hold considerable of my funds at virtually no interest.
 
My Google Earth Community posts may not be a significant contribution to the sum of human knowledge, but when I made them I thought they would at least outlive me and last until you or Google went out of business.  I certainly wanted the images in them to last for at least half a year, so I would have time to rationally decide which of my pieces I would try to save by revising the files with re-hosted images.  When I tried to upgrade to a basic premium account, I was charged $38 for six months, enough to pay for 19 months of premium basic or 9½ months of premium pro.
 
Was this outrageous sum charged because I live in Japan?  Or because I use the images in KML files?  Or merely because you have me by the short hairs?  Can I count on the last uploaded 500 files to be available after I cancel my subscription?  And is there any chance that I could pay you a onetime fee, however expensive, that would guarantee that you would host the files I presently have uploaded for as long as your company can manage to stay in business?  I can certainly envision more entertaining things to do with my twilight time than trying to figure out how the file names you have assigned my images relate to the ones I have stored on my computer.  And finally, what fee do you charge for downloading all of my hosted images?

I sent this message 11 days ago, and although they have usually not answered my correspondence in the past, I thought they might deem to reply to someone who was paying a handsome price for their service.  I got no reply, except for the usually acknowledgement email, with links to places on their site I had already searched for answers.

After a lot of searching, I did find an add-on for the Foxfire browser which works well.  (This is where I found the reference: https://getsatisfaction.com/imageshack/topics/download_all_my_images and this is the site where I downloaded it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/imagehost-grabber/?src=search ).  I wasn't able to down load all my images in one fell swoop, although I'm not sure it can't be done.  I downloaded one page of images at a time, which only took a few hours.  If I were doing it again, I would first delete all of the dead images, the ones that weren't supposed to disappear but somehow managed to fade into cyberspace.  After doing that, and deleting a few that I knew I would not be using again, I cut my total images to about 300 less.  In Foxfire, install the download, log on to Image Shack, and right click "my images".  ImageHost Grabber is the last item on the drop down menu.  The download is very fast, especially if you have first deleted the dead images.

Now that I have my images on my computer in a more or less re-hostable form, I'm trying to decide where to park them.  Having been burned once, I'm afraid other services may want to shake me down too.  Permanence is highly desirable, as is the convenience or auto resizing and prewritten codes.  Does anyone have any advice for me?