It shouldn't come as a surprise that the "free" third party image hosting service has this sort of thing happen. For anyone surprised by this, you must have never heard about Sony's Imagestation site doing about the exact same thing, circa 2007/2008...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageStation
Kudos for pelican for
completely fixing the functionality of their own image hosting feature on this site earlier this year, which was broken for a long time before that, which unfortunately probably drove more folks here to Photobucket and other third party hosting sites. I've noticed there are a lot more photos being shared since they fixed it, also. Time to make use of it!
It does suck what happened, and I feel for you guys who were using photobucket this way. Hopefully, the images will remain accessible to you for a long enough time to grab them, if you chose to keep your only copy on photobucket. (I would make no assumptions that the files will be maintained on any free web service in perpetuity...)