How to share photos online with your family using 5 of the best free image hosting sites

Sharing photos with your family anytime anywhere.

Sharing photos online over the internet has never been so popular or useful and free image hosting accounts are now very common with millions upon millions of photos been shared on a daily basis.

Courtesy of image hosting services families who live miles or even countries apart can now share photos that can be accessed on any device such as an iPad or iPhone and in any location minutes after the photo has been taken.

The beauty of a free image hosting account is that it requires nothing more than a device that can access and read a website and best of all they are free! We are going to look at 5 of the best free image hosts available.

Image shack

Imageshack is a free image hosting service owned by imageshack corp and headquartered in California. Imageshack also runs the popular yFrog service that is popular on twitter. The service has been around since 2003.

Image limit: 500 File limit (anything over is removed)

Image size: up to 5MB

Bandwidth limit: Images consuming more than 200mb of bandwidth in a day restricted

Subscription plans: Yes from $2 per month with various advantages including no limits, no ads and backups.

Other limitations/information on free account: None commercial use, Contains ads, No backups, No animated GIFS

Flickr

Flickr is a very popular image and video hosting site. Flickr is part of Yahoo after it was bought from ludicorp in 2005. It is claimed Flickr has over 50 million registered users’ hosts over 6 billion images. Flickr tends to be very popular with bloggers.

Image limit: 2 videos and 300mb of photos per calendar month

Image size: n/a

Bandwidth limit: n/a

Subscription plans: There are monthly yearly and 2 year pro plans which offer a number of benefits.

• Unlimited uploads and storage
• Unlimited sets and collections
• Access to your original files
• Stats on your account
• Ad-free browsing and sharing
• HD video uploads & playback

Other limitations/information on free account: n/a

Photobucket

Photobucket is an image hosting and video hosting service that was started in 2003 and tends to be used by people sharing family and personal photos. Photobucket has an excellent feature that allows you to password protect certain albums and restrict some to guest access while keeping others public. The password protected files are particularly popular with people sharing family or personal photos with numerous family members all over the world.

Image limit: Unlimited photos and up to 500 videos (10 mins in length)

Image size: Max 2048×1536 or 1MB

Bandwidth limit: None but they do reserves the right to limit excessive use.

Subscription plans: Yes. $2.99 per month, $24.95 per year, Biyearly $39.95

Pro plan includes the following and more (taken from Photobucket FAQ)

• Your account not only includes unlimited storage* but also unmetered bandwidth (Photobucket reserves the right to disable direct linking on accounts that use excessive bandwidth or otherwise abuse the system).

• Your original size images are stored (up to 20 MB) and you can have web-size images of up to 2 MB or 4000 x 3000 pixels per image. See for details.

• There is no advertising in your account or your shared content from your account, although you may still see advertising for sponsored features, in public search media, and in group albums (group albums receive free account benefits).

Other limitations/information on free account: Photobucket will limit accounts using excessive bandwidth, Ads on pages with free account.

Twitpic

Twitpic is a site that is used mostly by twitter users although it can be used independently. Twit pic was launched in 2008. If you have a twitter account you should be able to login to twitpic using the same login.

Imgur

Imgur is probably one of if not the most popular image sharing sites of all due to its popularity with reddit and digg users. Nearly half a million images are uploaded to the site every day and one of its big advantages is that the site requires no registration which is what makes it popular for the quick sharer.

Image limit: No limit on the number of images

Image size: maximum of 10MB but they will be compressed to 1MB

Bandwidth limit: none

Subscription plans: 1,3,6,12 Month recurring subscriptions.

Other limitations/information on free account: Free account images deleted after 6 months if no views, has ad`s.