Wondering if there are there any good sites out there made purely for free image hosting? Well, you're in luck! You just need to know where to look.
Sometimes, a Facebook album or an Instagram post isn't exactly the best solution. With an evolving web that's increasingly becoming more visual thanks to mobile browsing, free image hosting is basically a must-have these days.
Here are 10 of the best sites that offer free image hosting and make the process of uploading and sharing your images easier than ever.
Dropbox was among the first services to offer seamless upload and storage via its client software (though Box beat Dropbox to market by two years). The service is enhanced with an impressive. Dropbox is a popular file hosting service. Here’s how to use it to host images for your app. Go to your Dropbox Public folder. Upload your images into this folder. Click on an image.
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Unlimited Free Storage via Mobile Upload: Google Photos
Best for:
Automatically backing up photos that you take, uploading large quantities, uploading high-quality photos, editing them, organizing them, and finding them again later using visual search.
Max image size/storage:
Unlimited free storage for photos taken by smartphones and point-and-shoot cameras (16 megapixels or less) plus the option to alternatively use your limited storage space from your Google account for photos taken by DSLR cameras. You can also upload videos in 1080p HD.
Google Photos is probably one of the most useful photo resources you can use, mainly for its powerful automatic backup feature. And since you probably already have a Google account, getting set up will be easy.
You can access it on the web at photos.google.com or simply download one of the free Google Photos apps to automatically upload all photos you take with your devices. They'll all be synced up right across your account and accessible from anywhere.
You can also use Google Photos to edit your photos, organize them according to people/places/things and share them online even with non-Google Photos users. The more you use Google Photos, the more it learns about your photo habits so that it can take some of the manual work off your back by automatically organizing your photos for you.
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Ideal If You Want to Upload and Share GIFs: imgur
Best for:
Uploading photos (plus animated GIFs generated from videos) as quick and painlessly as possible without losing their quality, to be shared anywhere online — especially social networking sites.
Max image size/storage:
20 MB for all non-animated GIF images and 200 MB for animated GIF images.
If you’ve spent any time at all on Reddit, you probably already know that Imgur is the social news community's favorite free image hosting site for Redditors. You don’t even need to sign up for a free account if you'd rather not, and you can still upload photos in stunning quality within a blink of an eye.
Images from your computer can be uploaded to Imgur to be shared on your favorite social network via a unique URL, or within the Imgur community itself. You'll want to use the official Imgur app to use it from a mobile device too.
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Perfect for Creating Organized Photo Albums: Flickr
Best for:
Editing your photos to look their best, creating albums and social networking. You can also choose to publish your photos under Creative Commons licensing to allow others to use your photos with attribution.
Max image size/storage:
1 TB (1,000 GB) of free storage space.
Flickr is one of the oldest and most widely known photo sharing social networks currently out there and still going strong today. Besides being great for free image hosting, it also has editing tools you can use to perfect your photos before organizing them into albums so you can shown them off to the rest of the Flickr community.
You can configure your privacy options if you want to share your photos with a selected audience and you have opportunity to easily upload from a variety of platforms including via the web, your mobile device, email or other photo applications. The official Flickr mobile app is stunning and actually one of the best features of the platform. You may also want to take advantage of the Flickr Uploader tool that allows you to seamlessly backup your photos from your computer, Apple iPhoto, Dropbox and other places.
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A Platform for Serious Photographers: 500px
Best for:
Social networking with other photographers and licensing or selling your photos.
Max image size/storage:
Since 500px is more of a social network and photography portfolio site than a simple image hosting platform, it doesn't specify any file size or storage restrictions, but you can upload very large JPEG files. As a free member, you only get to upload 20 photos per week. A $25 annual membership gives you unlimited uploads and more features.
Like Flickr, 500px is a popular social network for photographers looking to share their best photos. It doesn't exactly compare to some of the alternatives discussed above because unfortunately, you can't directly link to photos if you want to share them elsewhere, but it's a fantastic option for photographers looking to show off their work and maybe make a little money from it.
500px users can create a profile to share their photos and premium users get the option to create a completely separate portfolio for a place to display their best work without the ratings and comments from the community. If you want to display a photo on a website, you can do so by copying the embed code from the photo page.
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Cloud Storage for Photos and Other File Types: Dropbox
Best for:
Sending or sharing individual photos or folders of photos with others.
Max images size/storage:
2 GB of free storage with the opportunity to earn extra free storage by inviting other people to join Dropbox.
Dropbox is a free cloud storage provider that you can use to store all sorts of different file formats, in addition to photos. You can get a shareable link to a single photo file or even an entire folder containing multiple photos to share with other people.
Dropbox also has a variety of extremely powerful mobile apps that you can use to upload, manage and share all of your photo files right from your device. You can even tap the arrow beside any file name to make it available for offline viewing when you don't have internet access.
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Simple and Speedy Individual Image File Uploads: Free Image Hosting
Best for:
Uploading individual photos fast and directly linking to them so they can be displayed elsewhere on the web (social networks, websites, forums, etc.).
Max image size/storage:
3,000 KB per photo file size.
Another top site for easily sharing photos, Free Image Hosting is similar to Imgur but without the trendy layout and or the convenient hyperlink shortener. As long as you don't mind the ads all over the site, you can upload images without needing to create a free account first and Free Image Hosting provides you with the HTML code to a direct link to your photo so you can share it easily.
Your images are stored on the site forever (even as an anonymous user without an account) as long as they adhere to the terms of service. You can also upload animated GIFs, although some may look distorted if they're too large in size.
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A Simple Solution When You Just Need to Host a Pic Somewhere: TinyPic
Best for:
Uploading photos fast and sharing them anywhere online — especially forum message boards.
Max image size/storage:
No larger than 1600px for both the width and height with file size limits of 100 MB. You can also upload videos up to five minutes in length.
Similar to Imgur and Free Image Hosting, Tinypic (a product of Photobucket) gives users a fast and simple way to upload and share photos without having to create or log into an account. Just choose the file you want to upload, add some optional tags, set the size you want and you're done.
Tinypic provides you with a simple link you can use to share your photo anywhere. Adding tags will help users who use Tinypic's search function to find relevant photos. Photos (and videos) that are not associated with a user account will remain on the site for at least 90 days, after which they may be removed if they haven't been viewed.
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Great for When You Want to Share Images in Forum Posts: PostImage
Best for:
Uploading individual photos to be shared on forum message boards.
Max image size/storage:
No specified file size or storage restrictions.
PostImage is a very simple site that gives you free image hosting for life with or with creating an account first. When you upload, you can choose to have your photo resized for you using the selections from the given dropdown menu and even choose to have the photo expire so that it's deleted after one day, seven days, 31 days or never.
This site is primarily used for hosting images for forums and comes with a simple image upload mod forum users can install and use. You can upload multiple images at a time and choose to resize them for avatar use, message boards, web, email or computer monitors.
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A Secure Place for All Your High-Res Photos: ImageShack
Best for:
Using it for business purposes, uploading large quantities of photos, organizing them and sharing single photos or entire albums.
Max image size/storage:
10 GB per month for free trial/non-premium users.
ImageShack has a non-premium account option and free 30-day trial to check out the premium features. This image hosting alternative has a great looking interface, somewhat similar to how Pinterest showcases its images in a pinboard-style layout. You can use it to upload as many high-res photos as you want, create albums, organize everything with tags and discover featured photos from other users for inspiration.
Privacy options are available if you don't want your photos to be viewed publicly, and you can easily share a single photo or an entire album with anyone you like. ImageShack also hosts photos for businesses and has several applications (both for mobile and the web) that you can take advantage of to make managing and sharing your photos even easier.
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A Quick and Simple Solution for JPEG/JPG File Types: ImageVenue
Best for:
Bloggers, message board users and eBay sellers using it to uploading and organizing large quantities of photos to share them with others through single photos or entire albums.
ImageVenue holds your images up to 6 MB in size, and it can resize big pictures to reasonable dimensions at upload time, too. Image quality and aspect ratio are preserved when resizing.
You can upload as many images as you want. Images stay on ImageVenue's servers forever unless they're not accessed for a year. After one year of not having been accessed, they'll be permanently deleted.
Unfortunately, image file types are limited to JPEG and JPG. You also have to have Adobe Flash installed to use it, which could eventually render this service unusable given that Adobe Flash has been discontinued.
It's unclear whether this platform is still being maintained by its developers. This might be a quick and simple image hosting solution for the time being, but you're probably much better of with one of the above platforms over the long run.
If you regularly take photos on your phone or tablet, uploading them to a cloud service like Dropbox makes it much easier to access them on your PC or other devices. Dropbox actually has a feature that uploads all your photos automatically, as you take them.
You can do this on both Android as well as iOS devices.
On Android
First, open the Android Dropbox app and tap the three lines in the upper-left corner.
A pane will slide out from the left edge. Now, tap the gear icon in the upper-right corner to access the settings.
With the Dropbox settings open, scroll down to “Camera uploads” and note there are four options.
The first option simply lets you turn camera uploads on or off. When this option is on, photos and even videos will automatically be uploaded when you take a photo.
The next option lets you choose between uploading photos and videos or just photos only. If you upload videos, remember they are larger and will not only take longer to finish, but also use more data, so if you have a data cap, you probably don’t want to upload videos.
The next option can also circumvent data cap problems. You can pick between uploading via Wi-Fi only, or both Wi-Fi and data.
Finally, it’s important to know that uploading consumes battery, so if you’re trying to conserve, then you can decide at what battery level uploading occurs, or if it only happens while the device is charging.
On iOS
Let’s switch over to the iPhone, which features options very similar to what you will find on Android. To access the upload options, tap the gear icon in the upper-left corner of the app.
Now tap on “Camera Uploads” to access the settings.
For the most part, the camera upload settings nearly mirror what you get on Android, with the exception of the battery saver feature.
First, you can turn camera uploads on or off, then you can elect to include videos, upload over cellular data, and upload videos over cellular data. Finally, there’s the option to use background uploading, meaning that when you take photos (and videos), they will upload when the Dropbox app isn’t open.
You may have noticed that background uploading needs to access your location to work properly. To make sure Location Access is enabled.
To do this, first open your device’s settings and scroll down to Dropbox.
Now, in the Dropbox settings, check to make sure Location is enabled.
Regardless of whether you use Android or iOS, your photos and videos will uploaded and saved to your “Camera Uploads” folder. Also, when you take screenshots, they too will be uploaded.
Dropbox’s camera uploading is a great way to make sure your photos and videos are automatically preserved, particularly if you only use Dropbox in lieu of other cloud storage services.
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