Capturing photos via smartphone or DSLR camera is a hobby for most of us. But for some people, it’s profession. Whether you’re a wannabe or a professional photographer, selfie addict or artist, your creativity will be unnoticed unless you share it with your friends, relatives or 1000s of people.
To make sharing easier, some developers have done an excellent job of launching photo sharing sites that make editing, downloading and uploading of photos a piece of cake.
There are many free image hosting websites, but only 7 of them are used most widely. Today, we’ll make you aware of these top sites through this article.
Note: You can also use the below list of sites as a photo backup service. Before you upload your pictures, make sure that you navigate to the settings page and change the privacy configuration. If you ignore this step, your pictures will be public and 1000s of users will view or download them to their PC.
Best free image hosting sites
Google photos
GP is a great platform for sharing photos online. It was unveiled and officially launched at the I/O event 2015. This site has been derived from Google plus. Thus, all pictures that you’ve uploaded to your G+ account will be automatically synced to this new service. You can configure this site to sync photos from Google Drive as well.
Google photos will organize your pictures into collections aka albums. It creates collages, stories, and movies from your saved content automatically. It has a utility to adjust brightness, contrast, the vignette in images.
This site includes more than ten filters. It supports cropping and tilting of pictures. It can generate shareable links for the users who want to share pictures on Facebook, Twitter or any other website. This site supports free unlimited storage of high-resolution photos. If you want to save images without changing their resolution, you’ll get just 15GB free space.
Visit Google photos here.
Flickr
Flickr is one of the best photo-sharing sites in the world. Flickr supports free storage up to 1TB. Thus, can save millions of photos online. It supports editing of photos with Aviary SDK.
With this editor, users can use the pencil tool to draw objects or apply effects on images. You can also add stickers and frames to photos with this editor. Other tools offered by Aviary are as follows:
- Red eye remover, cropper, resizer.
- Blemisher, whitener, etc.
Flickr generates twitter like profiles for every user that registers an account. Pictures in your Flickr account are sorted by upload date or time when the photo was taken, and they are organized in albums/camera roll. Just like Facebook, Flickr supports tagging and commenting on photos.
This website allows you to view images uploaded by other users. If you’re a photographer who wants to get appreciated for his/her work, upload your picture to Flickr and set its visibility to the public.
When people discover your content in their photostream or timeline, they’ll favorite or upvote it. Yahoo has launched a standalone app for Windows to upload photos to Flickr in bulk.
Yahoo has exposed the Flickr API for commercial and personal use. If you’re a developer, you can use this API quickly for adding this Yahoo service in your application.
Visit this site here.
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FB is a place where millions of images are shared online. Whether it’s a page, group or your Facebook timeline, users are allowed to post anything that doesn’t violate the terms and conditions of FB.
Pictures shared on this social network are compressed before they’re visible to the public or your friends. Don’t worry! Facebook will not change the quality of your photos.
Apart from its cropping tool, Facebook doesn’t feature advanced image editing utilities. This site allows users to comment on photos. You can also tag other users or add location with the picture on FB.
Visit FB here.
Photobucket
PhotoBucket site offers 2GB of free online storage space for saving media content. The most interesting feature of this site is that it displays the trending pictures just below your profile.
This section will refresh your mood as it shows some mind-blowing and unique pictures that you’ll ever come across. Photobucket is unique because it lets users upload GIF images. Its other features are same as Flickr.
DeviantArt
DA is a place where you’ll find all pictures, animations published by artists and photographers. DeviantArt features a powerful image editor that supports layering, blending, gradients and many advanced features. It allows users to explore images by categories. It has forums where you can interact with other artists or get tips from expert designers. You can use this site to upload and sell artwork online.
Visit DeviantArt here.
Imgur
Imgur is one of the most popular photos sharing site. With Imgur, you can create, manage or delete albums. It makes you aware of the number of times your image was Favorited/viewed or disliked.
Just like Flickr, editing feature in Imgur is powered by Aviary. Imgur comes integrated with AddThis plugin. Thus, you can share your favorite photo on any social network of your choice.
Users can upload only 225 photos to this site unless they subscribe to the pro version. Just like the above five websites, Imgur compresses high-resolution pics whose size exceeds 5 megabytes. Sometimes, the loss of picture quality is clearly visible.
Visit Imgur here.
500px
500PX has been advertised as a premium photography site. It features the most stunning images that you can’t even imagine 500px allows you to follow other professional and wannabe photographers. It allows users to subscribe to categories of their interest.
This site features an uploaded tool with which, you can import your gallery or pics from Facebook, Picasa, Dropbox, Amazon Cloud storage, OneDrive and many other services. 500px has a beautiful interface and an excellent layout.
Visit this website here.
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Conclusion: Free image hosting is possible with the above sites. You can control the privacy of your uploaded content easily with Flickr, Photobucket, Imgur, 500px, Google Photos, DeviantArt, and FB. We will include Instagram when its core features are accessible on desktop browsers. If you want to see your favorite site in the above list, make us aware of its features via a comment.
