Free Online Image Hosts
If you don’t have access to your own server and you want to post some photo’s online, perhaps on a forum you participate in, you can do a lot worse than using one of the many free online image hosting providers.
PhotoBucket is one of the biggest free image storage websites. They require registration (which is free), and if at some point you feel that you need more space, you can always upgrade for a small fee ($25 per year)… But then again, we want a free files host, not a paid one, so we’d have to make do with what we were handed out.
Once you have registered, you can create your own gallery where you can generate flash preview galleries of your photos for websites, blogs and forums, make folders, and see, share and display all your uploaded images in your online, customizable gallery. Max Image Size upload 1MB, 1024 x 768 resolution image.
The free account provides you with 1GB space and 10GB monthly bandwidth, which is quite a lot. Moreover, you can upload videos which are no more than 5 minutes long. The upload can be made from both your local machine or web URL (this is a new feature) and currently allows you to upload a maximum 20 images at a time. All files you host on PhotoBucket automatically generate thumbnails for a preview with a URL ready to use in HTML and BB (forums) code, as well as direct URL for hot linking. I personally use PhotoBucket and find it to be a very fast, easy and convenient way to store images online which all can be easily accessed through a well organised gallery. Note I said well organised? This is something you should always consider at the start, spend a few minutes thinking about how you’ll be using the space and create folders for different categories e.g. Business, Personal, Family, Friends, Soccer, Screenshots, etc, etc
Another very popular free image host is ImageShack.us. Despite the pop ups and the inconvenience caused by the excess of adverts, the host provides massive bandwidth per domain name (this includes forums as well, so if many members posted large images hosted on imageshack, the files will be down until the next hour when bandwidth throttle will be elapsed again.)
- Supported formats: .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif, .bmp, .tif, .tiff, .swf, – As long as file size does not exceed 1.5 megabytes.
- Advantages:
Many handy tools such as auto clickable thumbnail generator, resizing the image to different dimensions from 100×75 to 1600×1200. The thumbnails can be generated with or without the original file’s resolution (you choose), and if you register (for free), you can create your own gallery and see the files you have uploaded, delete unneeded ones, etc. Another advantage is that the files are hosted forever, unless someone reports inappropriate content or copyright infringement. If you find your photo/image has been illegally ripped from your site and hosted on ImageShack, all you need to do is contact them and they will remove the file, being a USA based company they are very familiar and concerned with Copyright law.
- Disadvantages:
A popup is generated way too often when you view images or enter the site. Understandable as they obviously need to cover the costs of such a big web server, yet we, the selfish free users will moan about it anyway. Another disadvantage is that big files get resized upon upload to save bandwidth, so you can’t host a huge, high resolution file. I could also mention that the hourly bandwidth limit is a burden, but don’t forget that most free file/image hosts provide a lot less than ImageShack.
If you want to save bandwidth on your own website, you can hotlink to the file but remember if the bandwidth is exceeded your visitor will only see an error image with a lovely yellow frog stating the file is temporarily unavailable… so, not recommended for any business or serious website that cares for its reputation.
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