Sitting Pretty: Five Free Image-Hosting Services

When listing products online on eBay or hosted storefronts, you might find that your provider just isn't offering up enough free image space to really show off your item, or that using the extra space there can result in higher fees. Bloggers may also may find their chosen service lacking in image space, and may want to link to images hosted elsewhere.

To help you with this dilemma, we offer the details on five free image-hosting Web sites that we recently tried. You can use any of these online image-hosting services to link your images to a variety of places such as eBay, storefronts, classified ad sites, blogs and other personal publishing spaces. Just one word of caution: it is always advisable to read the policy statement posted by each individual free service site before submitting your information.

Photobucket
Using Photobucket you can upload photos, videos and images for free. Photobucket automatically generates your link code for e-mail, instant messaging, direct linking and HTML code linking, as well as the code you use when posting the image to online forums. As you click on each image you have uploaded, you can use Photobucket to rotate and crop the image.

Photobucket (Click for larger image.)

Photobucket also lets you create several different types of image slideshows. Several types of features and effects are available for slideshows, including "old film" and fade and so on. You select the images that you want to use in the slideshow, and preview the final results as you create. Once you save the slideshow Photobucket again will generate the code you will need to link to the slideshow from other online sites.

The Photobucket Free Account offers 1GB of storage space, a maximum image size of 1024x768, 25GB of monthly traffic bandwidth, slideshows of up to 25 images, video lengths of five minutes, and you can also password protect individual sub-albums on your account. The Pro Account will upgrade your storage space to 5GB of storage, allow you to upload images up to 2240x1680 in size, post 10- minute videos, use 50 images in a slideshow, remove ads, use FTP access and more. The Pro Photobucket Account is $25 for one year (or $3.99 per month).

PhotoCrib
PhotoCrib offers Web publishers and online sellers free Web space to post images, create photo galleries with 360-degree spins and make slideshows. After creating your free account, you log in to the site and create a new folder to store your images in and then you can start uploading, five images at a time.

PhotoCrib (Click for larger image.)

After uploading has completed, you automatically are taken to another page where you can easily cut and paste the HTML code to use the images on another site. Using the online tools provided by PhotoCrib you can, in just a few clicks, create a 360-degree spin rotation of your images or create a slideshow. With the free hosting account, under your images in fine print text you will see a "Hosted By PhotoCrib.net tag line."

On the PhotoCrib site you can also access your image manager which will detail all of the photos you have uploaded, plus offer account information such as the amount of space used and remaining, your bandwidth usage and more.

The free PhotoCrib account offers up to 10MB of space, 300MB of bandwidth, and access to many of the features such as slideshow, galleries and 360 spin. To upgrade to unlimited images and increase your monthly bandwidth you can choose one of three paid accounts which range in price from $1.95 to $6.95 per month.

(Please Continue to Page 2 for three more services)