Yes.

Photobucket emailed many warnings over the course of multiples months saying "Your account will be deleted in X days" with a prompt to subscribe to keep your account.

At the time they were sending the emails, you could still login and download your photos (that's what I did). It was all very transparent.

The fact that the author missed these emails isn't really photobucket's fault, IMO.

(But not giving a preview of the account you're reclaiming isn't a good UX obviously, not going to defend that!)