I remember storing photos on fotki.com some years ago based on a recommendation. From a colleague. Functionally it was a good platform. After some years I wanted to download and they wanted to charge me $500 for access to my files. I ended up relying on local backup but the experience gave me chills that my photos were being held hostage.

Did you report them? Seems quite illegal, at least definitly against eu customer rights iirc to not list that charge anywhere and deny you your personal data.

No I did not. This was some years back before gdpr . They did not deny data, simply asked premium for my originals. I deleted account and moved on, since I had local copies, which took some time to locate among all the hard drives, but I did locate eventually.