Yes this had become a HUGE pain, I have seen thousands of threads on forums about many different subjects that are now without pictures.
Honestly ANY free hosting will do this in the future as they cannot afford to pay for the bandwidth that it takes to run their servers when millions or billions of hits are being recorded per day to download pictures. The sites that are charging a small fee will also be forced to up their prices if they get too busy - success is the killer here.
If you can get a basic website and do the hosting on there, then you have full control. Only problem is that when you stop paying they will be gone as well.