Okay, take a moment to laugh at me because I don’t know the answer to this question…
…I need to post some pictures online of an upcoming event and people from the associated message board want to see them. There are sites out there where you can post stuff and give people a direct link, right? Any suggestions? Free is good, but I’m willing to pay if I have to. I have an ordinary digital camera.
Do any of them allow you to grant access to only one part of your collection. In other words, I’d like to share these event pictures with these random internet people, but I don’t necessarily want them to be able to go through my family pictures should I choose to post them. Or can you make more than one account?
I use Image Shack. It’s free, uses no registration, allows hotlinking, and comes with a handy plugin for Firefox which allows you to host any image you come across with a simple context menu right-click.
Flickr is free if you only upload 200 pictures, with a few other restrictions. If you make pictures private, they can still be visible to users that you identify as “family” or “friends”, or you can send people a “guest pass” to see pictures that you have marked as private.
The quickest is tinypic.com
They don’t even need your email, so it’s super fast.
If you need to remove items, then you would have to sign up prior to posting.
There’s a similar site for creating short links that won’t break up when posted or emailed, and that’s tinyurl.com
Photobucket used to allow hotlinking, but now if the image gets enough traffic, they bump it into a normal view window. I hate it. I’ll check this one out.
OK, I’ve uploaded an image to ImageShack without any problems. But I can’t figure out how to link to that image within one of these message blocks. There is a box on ImageShack that does contain a list of actions, but none of them are “link to this image”. Any help would be really appreciated.
And since I’m sort of dim, it would greatly help if it were in Step 1, Step 2 format, and so forth. Sort of like you would do with a kindergartner.
I use SmugMug. So far I’ve uploaded about 19000 files (~20GB). You can change how your pictures are displayed and people can buy prints right from the site. Cost for a basic membership is ~$40. Also, great insurance in case your hard drive goes bust.
There is a link that will say “Direct link to image”. Copy/paste that link and put image tags around it, if the board you are posting to allows images (usually [ img ] [ /img ] but without the spaces between the brackets. Then put your URL in between those two tags)
Picasa from Google doesn’t give you too too much space for free, but you can make albums private. And if you want it gives you a little Google Map of where the photos were taken, like for vacations and stuff.
If you want to organize your photos into albums for other people to view, Photobucket and Flickr are good. If you just want to host a single image, imgur.com is a nice hassle-free alternative to tinypic and the like.