Jack:
As of this morning I had 476 photographs in my Photobucket account and have never had one deleted. There may be some inherent lack of stability in the small "free" accounts, but if you have signed up for a full year I would expect that you will have no further difficulty. Should you were ever allow your account to lapse, however, your photographs would probably all disappear wherever you had posted them. For instance, if you look back at some of the earliest posts on the Forum, circa 1994 or 1995, you will see the occasional blank square indicating that a photograph previously displayed is no longer available. That would indicate that the person posting the photograph has either deleted it from his/her album or allowed the subscription to expire.