Memories are golden. There is no other way to preserve memories than in pictures. Even when things change, memories of events never fade.
When the human memory fails, it gets mixed with images. Images also help to convey information to people faster.
In childhood education, images are the primary learning aids as most young ones can hardly read. It is used to illustrate written texts.
They are used to tell stories too. Images also break the language barrier as it is a universal language. Merely looking at an image, a lot of messages are conveyed without speaking a word.
Photography is no longer just a mere hobby, like in the past.
Today, you can create memories as well as make money from your images.
Many photographers sell their art online to collectors and dealers and make a huge amount of money. To sell your artwork online, you need a complete portfolio website.
This website will carry all the information your customers need to know about you. You’ll have a
chance to display your recent jobs, customer reviews, and so on, on the website.
Image hosting comes to play when you want to share images with family, colleagues, friends, and clients or upload them to your website.
You’ll get galleries filled with high-quality images that have access to anytime and from any place provided you are connected to the internet.
WHAT IS IMAGE HOSTING?
Image hosting is the process of uploading images to the internet. Your pictures become hosted after you have uploaded them, and they are accessible from anywhere.
After hosting these images, you have complete control over them and determine what to do with them. You have the liberty to host images to share with others or store them for future references.
Usually, a lot of people mistake image hosting for photo sharing. Let us get the difference between them right before advancing.
Photo sharing is when you create an album and upload pictures to Facebook, Instagram, Google Photos, Flickr, Snapchat, etc. Your images usually remain within these platforms.
On the other hand, image hosting allows you to include images into websites and blogs. You can copy the images embed links, and use them in your blogs. Your reach with image hosting is limitless.
Unlike in traditional hosting, these images are hosted over the cloud, where files are stored in data centers worldwide.
Your images are hosted on multiple servers worldwide, making image hosting more scalable, flexible, and reliable.
Let’s look at some of the best image hosting providers in the industry today.
1. ImgBB
Free image hosting providers such as ImgBB is hard to find. That is one of the reasons it is so popular is.
We also like that this hosting provider does not restrict the number of files users can upload, and they can remain online for a very long period.
Nevertheless, you must be aware that human editors will review the images you upload for improved quality.
ImgBB allows you to drag and drop images about your homepage and continue to load photos on your blog or website with a simple click.
This service is easy to use as you are not even forced to register before leveraging the platform. You can always upload files of up to 32MB at a time. Different format such as .jpg, .png, .gif, .bmp, etc are all accepted.
You can always upload more as there is no restriction to the number of times you upload images on ImgBB.
Copyrighted images are not allowed on this hosting service. Some human editors review uploaded photos to ensure they meet up their regulations.
Once you have passed this stage, you can copy and paste your images embed links to your blog or websites.
ImgBB has everything you need on its plugin already, so further customization might not be necessary.
There is an upload button that matches with your editor toolbar and has features like drag and drop, image resizing, remote upload, and many more.
Other features of ImgBB
- ImgBB has a user-friendly interface.
- You can easily drag and drop photos
- Integrates easily with an online website, blog or portfolio.
- You can easily share your image links with clients, family and friends.
- Account creation is compulsory, but it pays you to do so.
- Requires the approval of a human editor.
2. Photobucket
Photobucket is a powerful and popular image hosting and sharing service provider. Currently, Photobucket caters to the needs of over 90 million subscribers globally.
This American image hosting company allows you to keep photos intact in their original quality and never lets you compromise on its standards.
You are free to upload the same picture many times to different platforms via the embed link. It saves you time and repetition of tasks.
You also have total control over your images. It assures you of its safety and privacy. You can choose to share a photo with only a set of people.
One unique feature of Photobucket is how it allows you to interact with other users in your social networking context easily. You can use tag and follow-up, other users, on each new post made.
In other words, Photobucket allows you to track new uploads, follow group albums, following searches, and share your photos with other users.
Photobucket has an image editor on which you can unleash your creativity. You can use tools like cropping, filters, annotations, and stickers to enhance your images’ looks before uploading them.
You can also share your images to different platforms using the social sharing button.
Its free plan allows you to host a maximum of 250 images. If you want to host more, you can subscribe to any of their paid plans as shown below:
- $5.99/month for 2,500 images
- $7.99/month for 25,000 images
- $12.99/month for unlimited images
These prices are relatively low compare to the value you stand to enjoy by leveraging this platform.
3. SmugMug
It is not just an image hosting provider. They also specialized in website building. Yes, you read that right.
There are a ton of themes and templates you can pick from and customize to suit your needs. You can build an e-commerce website. That’s how powerful SmugMug can be.
Also, you can build your website and portfolio using the drag and drop customization interface. It can also have some HTML and CSS integrated for more customization.
This way, you can enjoy the unlimited and high-resolution video and photo storage capabilities of SmugMug.
You get to upload images, control your viewers and their access to your pictures. SmugMug also has world-class photo labs enabling you to print quality photos.
If you are seriously searching for an image hosting provider, then you should strongly consider SmugMug. Be sure that your images are secured as SmugMug will never mine, sell or share your images.
You can also integrate it with On1, Lightroom, and Luminar to simplify workflow and enhance your editing capabilities.
SmugMug goes for $7 per month or $55 if you will be paying for a year. Paying ahead for a year helps you to save an extra $29.
- Allows you to keep track of your visitors using advanced built-in analytics
- You can upload unlimited numbers of videos and photos
- All upload are backed up with Amazon Web service
- SmugWeb provides 26 portfolio templates for users to explore
- Relatively budget-friendly priced plans
4. Imgur
Imgur is another online image sharing and hosting company founded in 2009 by Alan Schaaf.
It is another free image hosting service that has gained popularity because of its exciting features.
JPEG, JPG, APNG, PNG, PDF, BMP, TIFF, XCF, and so on are the file formats accepted on Imgur. It is not very common with other image hosts.
There are a lot of photos, favorite GIFs, and funny memes hosted on this platform. Imgur supports images having a maximum of 20 MB size and up to 200 MB for GIFs. To use Imgur, creating an account is not compulsory.
It only means you will not add a caption or upload albums as you will require a username to do these.
You can upload and add captions to your images through your mail. Each image’s link is embedded in HTML and can be used for direct linking in other websites and blogs. Sharing your images on social media is also easy on Imgur.
One of the unique features of Imgur is that it allows other account holders to up-vote or down-vote an image. The up-voted photos remain at the top and vice versa.
It helps photographers and designers put in a lot of hard work to produce quality and beautiful images to get noticed on time. You get all of these features, and many more are available to you for free.
5. Img.vision
This is an easy-to-use platform that helps you to host your images. They are reliable and credible.
You can host your images and videos on Img.vision and embed them via the embed links on your blog or website or any other platform online.
This service is suitable for personal, corporate, and e-commerce sites as it enable you to showcase your products in your image gallery.
It supports file formats like PNG, JPG, and GIF. You’re allowed to drag and drop images or videos you want to host from your PC, Android, Mac, iOS, Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive, etc.
They have content distribution networks (CDNs) in about 90 countries and over 200 cities worldwide.
These CDN s are responsible for higher speed optimization. Your images will not be compromised as their cloud storage complies with cloud storage safety standards.
One of the distinct features of this platform is its responsiveness. You do not need to resize any image. They automatically take shape with the different screen sizes.
They also have a 100% uptime guarantee. It means your customers will always have access to your images as long as your subscription has not expired yet.
Img.vision costs $9 per month when billed annually. With this subscription, you can host 5 videos and 5 000 images. For more, you can opt for any of their two other plans:
- $25/month for 40 videos and 9 000 images
- $99/month for 500 videos and 50 000 images
6. Flickr Pro
This image hosting company has been a part of SmugMug and currently has one of the most significant internet communities. Its base offering, Flickr, is free to use. It can allow up to a thousand videos and images.
Despite being free, it has some excellent features such as intelligent photo management, editing tools, and so on.
The paid plan, as expected, has even more advanced features. Some of them are unlimited storage, smart photo management facilities, advanced editing tools, backs up your images from your devices, etc. You also get to organize your images into an album to make them easy to locate.
You can add some more information such as location, license information, tags, and so on. You can also relate with your analytics on the pro plan.
You get to see how people interact with your pictures. It tells you the images that are performing well and attracting traffic. It means you what works and what doesn’t
Flickr Pro costs $6.99 per month with the monthly billing. The three months and annual billing plans cost $18.99 and $60, respectively.
CONCLUSION
There are many more images hosting providers in the industry today. It is crucial to store essential images on the cloud, especially for photographers and designers.
Your hosted images will always serve as a backup in case of hardware failure, virus attack, and so on.
Also, you can easily store many more images on these hosts than on your hardware device.
Some of the paid plans even allow you to store an unlimited number of images and videos. You can also link these images to your websites, blogs, social media, etc.
Take your time to carefully examine each hosting provider and ensure that the services they provide suit your needs before paying for it.