Is there a photosharing website anywhere with the following characteristics?
Free
Does not require joining Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook, etc. in order to sign up. I’ve avoided these like the plague - especially Yahoo. Worse than a virus.
I’m just after a site with a simple signup directly to the site, not thru anybody else.
I’ve found a number of photosharing sites on the Internet, but they all cost money or require signing up using one of the groups mentioned above. If you have any advice here, I would really appreciate it.
I wouldn’t mind spending a few bucks on this, but I would use it so seldom (actually, only for the Straight Dope several times a year) that it just doesn’t make any sense to spend $$ on this.
tinypic requires no signing up (although you can also sign up and create an account). Uploaded images not associated with an account are kept until they have not been viewed for 90 days.
Also, some sites have a great big default box that asks you to login with your Facebook ID, and it looks like there’s no other option, but if you look real hard, there’s sometimes a place where it says in teeny-tiny print “Or use email” with a place to type in an email address.
I’m also not on Facebook, but I have a couple of throwaway addresses that I use for signing up for stuff.
Imgur doesn’t have great slideshow/album viewing features (it just shows all the pics one after another on a long page) and it has a lot of ads, but otherwise it’s great.
Google’s free Picasaweb is good, both for sharing and for the free photo managing software (Picasa) that works with it, but is not required for it. Or, with the same account, you can use Google Photos (https://photos.google.com/) for a more modern feel.
Flickr has great presentation, but it’s owned by Yahoo… so you’re not signing up “through” Yahoo, it just IS part of Yahoo.
Dropbox offers 2GB free and has a reasonably good photo sharing service attached to it.
Just because most users don’t know how to use a feature doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Back when we were still playing SimCity, I made a gallery (several galleries, in fact) of my city, like so: Terminus Isle - Album on Imgur
Using a service like Imgur which is entirely paid for by ad revenue with an Ad Blocker installed is pretty despicable. If you don’t want to see ads, don’t use the service. Reading content using an ad blocker is one thing, but actively using their service to host your images while blocking the ads that pay for it is another.
Imgur is not some huge faceless corporation, its a bunch of geeks that were originally users of Reddit who wanted a better image hosting service. They are less than 20 employees. If you use their service while blocking ads you are directly stealing from them, real costs for disk space and bandwidth.
Oh cool, didn’t know that about the album view. It’s still not as good as the other photo sharing sites, IMO, but it’s better than the “all these pics on one long page” view.
The morality of using an ad blocker is outside the scope of General Questions. If you wish to debate this, please take it to IMHO, GD, or the Pit. Let’s drop this discussion now.
I don’t think it’s outside of GQ to point out that your claim is false, no matter what you think on the morality subject. Imgur is also supported by the Imgur store. And it previously had “pro” accounts that offered special features, though now those features have been rolled out to everyone.
They also actively provide images in ways that not include ads. They allow hotlinking. or direct access to the image file, without ads. And there are no ads on its mobile site–or at least, I’ve never seen any, despite having no ad blocker on my phone.
Imgur was originally created to have an easy place to upload images for Reddit, without sacrificing any anonymity. It has been the default practice on Reddit to hotlink all images (so that they will can be rendered by either a browser plugin or mobile app). In fact, if a site doesn’t allow hotlinking, people will just copy the image to Imgur.
Imgur became big because they keep out of your way, making a more attractive offer to people on Reddit or 4chan or similar sites–a large percentage of whom use ad blockers. (Well, relative to the Internet as a whole. Though Reddit has become more popular since six years ago.)
WOW! This SDMB is a weird and wonderful place. Here I just asked a simple question about photosharing sites (rapidly and very usefully answered) and it rapidly morphed into a big argument (with Moderator input) about Internet advertising. No wonder I spend so much time here!
Good photosharing info here, thanks. Also good info about the factual consequences of using an ad blocker when using a free service, thanks for that too.