Free Image Hosting
Image hosting is a method by which people can upload images to particular servers, which will then make the images visible to other Internet users. There are two types of image hosting, the free and the paid services. While the free services are more abundantly available on the Internet, the paid services have more features to make them appealing to users. Here we look at what free image hosting is all about and how paid hosting differs from it. We begin by getting a general idea on image hosting.
What is Image Hosting?
Basically, hosting on the Internet means putting something online on a special server from where it can be accessible to other people across the Internet. Even websites need to be hosted. In order to make the website visible to surfers on the Internet, it is necessary to host the website, which means upload it on a special server from where it can become accessible to all other users.
When this concept applies to images, the images are said to be hosted. People who wish to share images will upload them to special servers from where other Internet users will be able to access them. These special servers are called as the host servers. The server will provide the uploader with a particular bandwidth and usually with a restriction on the size of the image and sometimes even its format. There may be several other restrictions too. Some servers might demand for only original images which others might take images that are present elsewhere. Some servers allow for hotlinking of images, which allow them to be available across multiple websites, though this is a controversial topic in itself.
The biggest use of image hosting is for people who have a website. They can hotlink these images to be part of their website so that their website gets image content. The server will provide a code which can be placed on the website and used in that way. The popular image hosting website, Flickr, allows for such kind of hotlinking. Most of the images for eBay are also hotlinked from other sites. We shall see a bit about the controversy on image hotlinking later in this article.
How does Image Hosting work?
The following is a step-by-step description of how a typical image hosting service would work.
1. The first step is to make a profile on any image hosting website. The user needs to be logged on into the profile to upload images.
2. If the website provides several services, which in most cases it will, the link for "Image Hosting" will need to be clicked on.
3. Clicking on this link will open a catalog of the already existing image categories, with some other features such as "Recently added pictures" or "Most viewed pictures". Somewhere on this page will be the link to add the picture. This should now be clicked. It will open up the interface using which the image can be uploaded to the server.
4. The image will need to be described. For this, a short title bar is provided. Sometimes there tags and keywords will be required to help the search engines locate these images more easily. Filling in this column correctly helps the image-containing website to rank better on the search engine results.
5. For actually adding the image, there will be a button to browse the computer to get the required image. For most image hosting websites, it is required that the image be located on the user's computer hard disk from which the image will be retrieved by the server.
6. Once the image is selected, it must be saved so that it is permanently recorded on the server.
Different websites have different options for uploading images, but the above is a general manner in which it is done. These websites will also allow people to edit their images once they are uploaded. This follows a similar process as above, wherein the image will need to be accessed from the profile of the user. If the image needs to be deleted from the server for some reason, a very simple procedure that usually involves a "Delete" button is provided.
Once the image has been uploaded, the website will provide the user with a particular code. This code is the code for the image, which can be used if the user intends to embed the image onto other places. The user can use this code to put the image on his or her website, blog or forum, message board or even send it through an email. This is the part where hotlinking comes into the picture.
Why is Hotlinking not Always Acceptable?
Hotlinking allows people to use images they have uploaded on one server on another server. For example, if a user has uploaded an image on server A and has a website on server B, the user can hotlink the image to the server B so that whenever someone visits the website, they can see the image on it. This is generally done by people who have multiple websites on multiple servers or need an image to be shown through various websites. That is the legal and intended use of hotlinking.
But hotlinking has become a hot issue within the field of image hosting, and especially free image hosting services are facing the brunt of it. This is because each time the website is loaded, the image will be shown and hence the server on which the image is uploaded will have to pay bandwidth costs. This will definitely not fit in with the cost constraints of the free image hosting service and hence hotlinking is usually not preferred. However, there are websites such as Flickr which allow hotlinking. These websites make good revenue through their advertising affiliates and hence for them such hotlinking does not create much of a problem. Another website that allows for such hotlinking, though for images and not for videos, is YouTube. Videos from YouTube can be easily used on other websites.
How does Free Image Hosting differ from Paid Image Hosting?
The usual policy for image hosting websites is to provide free services and earn through their advertisers. They can place these advertisements on various places on their websites, including the homepages and the "image not found" pages. The advertisements help the image hosting websites in managing their operational costs and even make their profits due to which they do not need to seek money from the people who use their hosting services.
At the same time, there are image hosting services that offer paid image hosting in addition to their free image hosting services and there are also those that exclusively provide paid image hosting. There is certainly a difference between the paid and the free image hosting services. The main differences are:-
1. The bandwidth that is available to the image uploader,
2. The size of the image that can be uploaded,
3. Supplementary benefits such as customizable skins, subdomain usage, etc. and
4. Password encryption for certain features such as photo albums.
Paid image hosting sites may also have some additional features for users. Some of these might allow users to compile the images they upload into a slideshow format. This might be done by users who wish to show several profiles of a product they are selling without wanting the viewer to navigate through each image singularly. They might also allow users to create galleries and photo blogs with their images. Some paid websites allow the users to append captions and notes to their images (free image hosting sites also have these facilities, but all of them may not have it).
Some of the features may be available with paid websites which allows people to specify a custom size for their images and all images that they upload will then be scaled to this particular site. Paid users may be allowed to use sidebars for the images within the browsers.
On the other hand, free image hosting services generally allow users a maximum capacity of 1 GB. (Paid image hosting sites can give a capacity of up to 30 GB.) There is a restriction on the number of views that an image can have too. This restriction is usually kept at 10,000 image views a month. (With paid membership sites, the number of image views is unlimited.) However, the user might have a facility to upload as many images as he or she chooses. The website will then provide the user with a code that will allow him or her to use the image on other places such as blogs, emails, forums and even on websites.
For whom is Free Image Hosting Suitable?
Free image hosting is restrictive, but even then it is the most popular kind of image hosting. By implication, it means that this kind of image hosting should be suitable for all kinds of users. That is indeed the case; most people find all their needs met with the typical 1 GB space that these hosting services provide for free and up to 10,000 image views.
However, people who have needs of a greater capacity than that may need to go for paid image hosting services. This includes people who have huge businesses selling various products through several websites. For such people, paid membership with its unhindered capacities help to showcase their products better and expose them in a better manner over the Internet.
Then there are people who might want to use paid image hosting services because of the added features that they can get on these services. Some people might want to use them for the additional security that they get and because some feature on these websites might help them manage their tasks better.
Benefits of Free Image Hosting
There are some benefits of free image hosting that cannot be denied:-
1. The basic benefit is that a person can make images available on the Internet and searchable by others. People have a profile where they can upload their images. This could be a great way for hobby as well as professional photographers to popularize their talents online. At the same time, people can edit already existing images intelligently and upload them on their profiles. This gives them a creative outlet.
2. It allows webmasters to have an access to free images on their website. People who are starting out with an online business may not have the financial resources to go ahead with a paid hosting site, considering that they will have to pay for web hosting as it is. In such cases, free image hosting becomes an option that they can consider. The images add to the appeal of their website.
3. Since images ask for a description and tags, they can add to SEO. Search engines are rapidly considering the media features present on websites when they are ranking them. If intelligently done, the website may rank higher on the search engine results because of the search engine optimization that is done on it through the tags and the keywords.
4. Hotlinking, though debatable, is a method that can be used by website owners to have one image across various websites they own. This reduces costs, whether they are using original images taken by them or purchasing rights for already existing images.
5. The social networking aspect of image sharing websites such as Flickr, Photobucket, Fotki, Imageshack, Jalbum, SnapFish, Webshots, Woophy, Zoomr, Phanfare, Picasa and others cannot be ignored. Not all of these sites provide for free image hosting, but they allow people to upload images and allow others to view them and comment on them. There are also possibilities for people to sell private images to a select list of people, which allows family and friends staying far away to check out photo albums without spending any exorbitant costs.
Free image hosting is a very popular mode of photo sharing today, which is done for commercial reasons as well as for bonding with people and even for recreation. The number of people using these services is significantly improving with each passing day.
