Many things are as terrifying as the thought of losing never-ending work hours. A damaged hard disk or a broken laptop can take so much of your hard work and memories with it. Fortunately, some of the best image hosting sites offer secure ways to store and save your photos. You can have dependable backup by saving your content on external servers or the cloud.
Furthermore, uploading your work to these image hosting sites allows you to save more space on your phone and computer, which helps them operate faster and ensures that your images are available anytime, from anywhere, and on any device—making it easy to share them with anyone.
While nothing will ever substitute your online portfolio, these platforms can combine your website with exciting add-ons like integrated editing tools, online stores, or access to a community of photographers.
Best Image Hosting Sites
1. ImgBB
Minimalist free image hosting sites like ImgBB are hard to find, which may explain their popularity. You can drag and drop and upload images without registration for quick use, but to manage albums, delete images, or access pro features, you’ll need to create an account.
On ImgBB, the free account allows uploads of up to 32 MB per file (with a pro plan you can upload up to 64 MB). There is no published hard cap on the total number of images or how long they stay online under normal use, though usage is subject to ImgBB’s terms and rate limits.
2. Wix
You can compromise on many things in life, but not on your goals and indeed, not on having your photography website. Think about it: what’s the first thing you do when you hear about someone you don’t know? You ‘Google’ them. The same goes for prospective clients who want to know more about you or are searching for a photographer like you.
They expect to find your outlet when they enter your name or profession on the Internet. Today, it is considered a leading indicator of reliability and professionalism. Unlike all other image hosting options, you can control every part of your portfolio, from the design to the content.
Wix offers you the capability to quickly create a complete website. Furthermore, the Wix Pro Gallery conserves the quality of every picture you upload so your visitors can view your images, whether JPEG or PNG, in a fast and the best way on desktop and mobile.
Last but not least, you can have Wix provides free web hosting for your galleries, with the Pro Gallery preserving image quality. But its free tier has limits on total storage or bandwidth; full flexibility often requires a paid plan. No wonder Wix is one of the best free image hosting sites.
3. Photobucket
The image hosting and photo-sharing platform, which is used by millions of users worldwide, is none other than Photobucket. It allows you to upload the same picture numerous times to different blogs, websites, online marketplaces, or forums.
Just use its easy-to-copy embed link and share images wherever you want and save your time and effort on tedious tasks. You can still set privacy options (e.g., private vs. public albums), but under the free plan, embedding and external linking are often disabled or limited.
For example, if you want to share some family pictures with only your family members, you can adjust them accordingly. Using their intuitive image editor, you can boost your creativity. You can present pictures the way you want using brilliant filters, annotations, stickers, and cropping and then upload them. With Photobucket, you can get a button for social sharing that works nicely to upload your photos across different platforms.
It comes with free and paid plans. Photobucket’s free plan is very limited, with strict caps on storage and bandwidth. Its paid plans (about $6 to $13 per month) offer greater storage and full hosting capabilities. The free version is heavily limited and no longer supports third-party hosting (i.e., embedding) in many cases.
4. Google Photos
Google Photos gives you 15 GB free shared across Gmail, Drive, and Photos. High-quality/full-resolution uploads now count against that quota. But it shouldn’t be discarded just yet. Firstly, it automatically syncs with your other Google accounts, saving you a lot of time storing or sharing your images.
Secondly, the platform offers a very nice tool to create your collages and animations based on the photos you uploaded there. Lastly, Google Photos may be the most innovative option when it comes to organizing your photos—by location, date, or even people appearing.
An even more spectacular feature is the more you upload, the better Google Photos’ algorithms organize your content automatically.
5. Imgur
Do you have a picture that can be viral? Share it on Imgur, where thousands of visitors post their most hilarious, cutest, or breathtaking photos daily, hoping to win votes. However, all shots are permitted, including memes, kittens, and memes of kittens. Unsurprisingly, it is the favorite image-hosting site for Redditors.
If you don’t want to participate in this competition of the best (or worst) of the Internet, upload your image without clicking the “Share to Community” button. Your photos can remain stored indefinitely, though inactive images may eventually be removed per Imgur’s policy.
6. Flickr
Known to be one of the most famous and best image hosting sites, Flickr can be your next choice for image hosting. Flickr allows users to optionally license images under Creative Commons so others can reuse them with credit.
You can use its brilliant editor to fine-tune your images before posting. All your photos can easily be arranged into an album, so you don’t have trouble finding them. You can back up photos impeccably from your system, Dropbox, Apple iPhoto, and other ways.
Complement your images with geolocation, tags, license information, etc., and you can use its API (Application Programming Interface) to help your developers work together. Flickr’s free plan allows up to 1,000 images or videos with smart management and editing tools.
Read More: 9 Image Optimization Tools for Image Compression
7. ImageShack
If you are familiar with Pinterest, you will find it recognizable to work with ImageShack because of the similarity of the layout. You must create an account for free before you start uploading images. It offers impressive features useful for users of diverse skill sets.
You can arrange your images into albums and add tags to track them effortlessly. It has dedicated web and mobile apps like ImageShack, which provides web and mobile tools, including the ‘ShackIt’ extension, for quick uploading and resizing, letting you edit, crop, and publish photos easily.
8. Free Image Hosting
The procedure of uploading photos to Free Image Hosting is as simple as the platform’s name. Otherwise: “Some free image-hosting sites let you upload without creating an account; however, the durability of stored images often depends on the service’s policy (some may delete inactive content).
On FreeImageHosting.net, U.S.-based photographers can list their business in a commercial photographers directory, increasing visibility among local clients.
9. PostImage
PostImage’s user-friendly features make it an extremely popular and one of the best free image hosting sites among shutterbugs. This user-friendly platform lets you upload several images at once and determine the size and expiration date for your images.
With just the click of a button, you can resize your images to various specified dimensions, including popular sizes such as avatar (100×75), message boards (648×480), 15-inch monitor (800×600), and 21-inch monitor (1600×1200), among others. You can also choose how long the image remains online—from a day to a month—or store it permanently.
Why Should You Choose a Specialized Image Hosting Platform?
Whether you are a professional blogger, photographer, or amateur shutterbug, image hosting could help you in many ways. Besides, you can never know when your hard drives will fail or crash. If it does, it results in a massive data loss, which is frustrating and painful, considering your whole work or prized memories are gone within a blink of an eye.
The perfect solution to such a situation could be dependable hosting. With your images stored securely in the cloud, you can be assured that your memories and work are perfectly secure. You can use some of the best image hosting sites to securely upload your images.
