Free Image Hosting Sites Overview
Free image hosting sites allow you the freedom to upload images and host them freely on a website, share these images with friends, and get your creativity out there into the world!
For the technical enthusiasts amongst us, how free image hosting sites work is that you get an upload interface (usually a website) where you can specify the location of the image file on your PC or Mac. Then you simply upload your image. If you have a whole heap of pics to upload, some sites will even let you batch upload zip files. You can also use FTP uploading if you need.
Once your photos are 'live' (Ie. hosted on their server), they're available on the web and to the public. This is where you let your imagination run wild by creating photoblogs, photo galleries using your own pictures, or cool Flash based slide shows for easy viewing.
The Top 10 Free Image Hosting Sites
You have a field day for choosing an image host because there's so many of them available to pick from. In fact, here's the top 10 free image hosting and photo sharing websites.
Picasa Web Albums: You can upload your images to Picasa via your blog or through your Google account. Picasa is Google's 'baby' so you can be sure it'll be solid and reliable. Advantages to using Picasa include - design and create photo collages, use Google maps with your images, create beautiful web albums, and organize your photos based on the people in them! So, basically Picasa rocks!
www.Flickr.com: Flickr is probably one of the top free image hosting sites. These guys let you take control of all the hundred or thousands of photos on your hard drive, and organize them exactly how you want to. In a way Flickr is a high quality photo organizer. You can upload to them through your cell phone, from your iMac, or whatever software you're using. Then share to your heart's content! For free accounts, the maximum storage is 100MB, with the capacity to upload two (2) videos per month.
www.Photobucket.com: Popular site - one of the premier sites for storing your photos. A Photobucket account can store thousands of photos, videos, and has heaps of image management tools. From scrapbook builders, to album themes, to built in photo editors, Photobucket will do you well for hosting and sharing your images.
www.ImageShack.com: ImageShack is a user-friendly media hosting service. Actually these guys really simplify things - you can resize images, upload multiple pics at the same time, and you don't need to register to upload your images. However it's probably a good idea! ImageShack is completely free, but choosing the paid upgrade will give you more benefits.
www.Tinypic.com: Tinypic lets you share your images and videos on MySpace, eBay, Orkut scrapbooks and photoblogs (and non photo blogs too!) No registration or log in required. They'll give you the URL of your image once it's uploaded and you can then use this on your favorite sites, blogs, forums etc. Your images will be linked through to TinyPic that way. Owned by PhotoBucket so quite possibly very reliable!
www.iimmgg.com: A simple photo host, Iimmgg lets you keep track of how many folks view your pictures, organize your images into photo galleries, and is integrated with Picnic (an online image editing tool) so you can edit and effects to your photos.
www.Pictiger.com: Host as many images as you want with this site. Create a thumbnail image, resize it, and post it anywhere you like. Going by its Alexa ranking, it's popular! Simple site - join up for free to find out how it works and what you can get up to!
www.Pict.com: Pict is another easy to use free image hosting sites. They'll let you share your images with blogs, forums, message boards, hotlink images and upload with one-click. You can also use ICQ, AOL and email (etc) to share your photos with people. Upload up to 12MB in size. Three different types of user accounts from unregistered to premium PRO account.
www.Iimmgg.com: Imgur can be utilized to share pictures as well as post images on message boards and blogs. Manipulate your images, display your photos on their photo gallery, and so on. Created by Alan Schaaf, a computer student at Ohio University, Ohio, USA.
www.PhotoTime.com: With PhotoTime you get a basic membership plan with 500MB of space to host your images, and 2000MB of bandwidth. However by paying $23.95 a year you can boost that to 4GB and 20GB of bandwidth. With the free option you can still share photos and videos, purchase prints, link directly to photos, organize and caption your images, and even sell your photos. Excellent online help center too!
The majority of these free image hosting sites are supported by advertisements and are free of charge. Some give you the option for paid image hosting functions usually if you need more services and have HUGE amounts of photos to upload. The paid services generally provide better features, more storage and allow users to have password protected photo albums with other customized functions. Whichever photo host you choose, enjoy sharing your photos online!
SmugMug is another photo host option however it's not free. Focused on quality, with no advertisements, SmugMug costs about $39.95 to $149.95 a year and is the sort of image sharing/photo sharing host that you can trust for your most prized photos. SmugMug also allows you to offer your own photo merchandise for sale including photo books, photo cards, canvas prints and photo stickers. Add videos, slideshows or host your own cool photo gallery. Try SmugMug free here.