One of the recent articles on my personal website enjoyed phenomenal unexpected popularity (~100,000 page views in a month, which is a big deal for me).
Unfortunately, this has caused my host to slap me with a bandwidth charge - not an extortionate one, but probably something I could have avoided altogether if I’d managed the images on the page differently - the images represent about 80% of the bytes for that page.
So… is there such a thing as a free image host that:
-Doesn’t care what images I store (not that they’ll be offensive, just that they might appear random or nonsensical without the accompanying text).
-Is generous with bandwidth
-Doesn’t mind me hotlinking the images into my own site
-Will not add intrusive stuff such as watermarks, popups, hyperlinks to the images when I embed them on my site
?
I realise that I’m asking for something for nothing. Just wondering if there are any suitably obliging image hosts.
ImageShack seems to meet most of your needs, I think. You get up to 300MB/hour bandwidth for your images. Also, no matter what service you use, I recommend checking out RightLoad, a program that gives you a right-click option in Windows Explorer to upload one or multiple images to the image hosting website of your choice, then returns a list of links to the images. That program has saved me a ton of time just in posting images on forums.
TinyPic is part of Photobucket - not sure if they share the T&Cs, but I think I worked out that photobucket’s bandwidth limit might trip me up if something like this happens again.
I’ve finished transferring nearly all of my main images onto ImageShack and it seems to work fine/unnoticeably, and has brought the bandwidth use back to manageable levels (I think some of my images were also being hotlinked elsewhere, contributing to the problem - so I’ve removed all the local copies of the images that I’m hosting off-site).
Anyway… What I now need is a photo storage site that comes with some kind of decent embeddable thumbnail gallery generator. ImageShack has an embeddable slideshow, which is OK, but not really very configurable and would not work well for large sets of pics.