LostInTechnology

4 Great and Free Online Image Hosting and Sharing Services

Posted on 07. Oct, 2009 by Aminul Islam Sajib in Internet Tools

Have you noticed the power of images on the internet? From professional journalists to weekend bloggers, everyone uses images or pictures of various things in their articles to make it look attractive and help tell a story. Remember the saying:

“A picture is worth a thousand words.”

If you’re hosting your blog on, you probably have plenty of space to store your online images, but what if you run out one day or are using a hosting plan that gives you very little space?

One great way to save a little space is to host your photos on another site or service.  Most of these sites do more than just host images.  They could provide you photo editing tools or the ability to share your photos with lots of other people.  There are lots of great options for hosting photos, and we are going to tell you about 4 of them today.

Flickr

When talking about free image hosting online, the name Flickr comes first. Primarily, it’s called a photo sharing website, but you can host your images for free and use them anywhere you want. Nowadays, Flickr is arguably the best image hosting service.

Features

• Flickr is free to use. You can upload as many pictures as you want. However, you have a monthly limit of 100MB of uploading space. After a month is passed, the limit will reset. You can lift up this limit by upgrading your account to a professional level which will cost you (but not too much).
• Geolocation tagging feature which lets you find photos uploaded from close by areas.
• You can use your Yahoo Email ID to sign in to Flickr. If you have more than one Yahoo ID, you can merge them together to increase monthly uploading limit.
• You can set the privacy level of your uploaded photos. This can be set each time you upload a photo.
• Visitors can leave comments on your uploaded photos.
• You have the ability to make minor edits to your photography such as rotating.

Photobucket

Photobucket is very similar to Flickr. You can upload and share photos from your mobile, Email, or IM.

Features

• Share photos with anyone in the world. Nobody needs to sign up in order to view your comment unless your photo privacy is set to private.
• Supported Formats: 3g2, 3gp, 3gp2, 3gpp, 3p, asf, avi, divx, dv, dvx, flv, gif, moov, mov, mp4, mpeg4, mpg4, mpe, mpeg, mpg, qt, wmv, xvid, and rm.
• Monthly bandwidth is 1GB. Maximum allowed size of a single photo is 1MB.
• You have a total storage of 1GB. But you can go professional in order to get larger space.
• Photos larger than 1 MB are automatically scaled down.
• Group Album features lets you collaborate photos between friends, colleagues, co-workers, organizations and the likes.
• Not only photo; but you can also upload videos and music to store them in different albums.
• You choose your style. There are plenty of album designs available to choose from.
• Built-in photo editor lets you resize, put frame around, and apply special effects.

Image Shack

Besides those big companies, there are lots of others who let you enjoy the feature of free photo hosting. Some of them require no sign-ups like ImageShack.

Features

• Image Shack lets you upload photos up to 15MB in size.
• Supported Formats are .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif, .bmp, .tif, .tiff, and .swf.
• Uploaded images will remain live forever.
• You can instantly upload a photo and get links to it; no sign up or registration is required.
• You can resize your photo while uploading.
• You can directly upload images from url; instead of from your hard drive.
• After an image has been uploaded, you will be given direct link, short link, code for forums and websites to the uploaded image.

TinyPic

Another great image hosting service is TinyPic. Photobucket actually operates this free image hosting service. You can upload pictures and videos at no cost. Recently, it has been updated to add some new features and make it more user friendly.

Features

• Supported formats for pictures are: jpg, jpeg, gif, bmp, png, and tif.
• Supported formats for videos are: avi, mov, mpeg, divx, 3gp, qt, and dv.
• You can resize your picture while uploading.
• You can instantly upload photos and videos from the homepage. No registration is required.
• TinyPic has a mobile-friendly version.
• Photos hosted/uploaded on tinypic are not private; rather they are shared and visible in search result (within Tinypic). It is a lickr-like service.
• Uploaded image are never deleted.

Have Your Say

Have you been using any other image hosting services?  If so, which one is your favorite?  Let us know in the comments.

(By) Aminul Islam Sajib is a 16-years-old young enthusiastic blogger and technology writer from Dhaka, Bangladesh who usually blogs in his technology blog Life with Technology. He is a technology reporter of a national daily newspaper and an online news agency of Bangladesh. You can also connect with Aminul on Twitter or Facebook.

Image by Pink Sherbet Photography

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Tags: blog, flickr, free, image shack, Links, photo, photobucket, service, sharing, tinypic