Image hosting is a thriving business right now. Many people use it for several reasons, for business, for portfolio, or simply for sharing photos online. However, most decent image hosting sites are not totally free. They host your images for a standard fee or a fixed amount you’ll pay on a monthly or yearly basis. To get decent image hosting services, you’ll have to pay up. Or so you think.
Social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace requires you to put up a personal profile and a profile picture. Once you have uploaded the picture, you will need to locate a free picture hosting site. These sites allow you to add pictures for free, which can be hotlinked to another website. Hotlinking means using a direct link from a file on one site, and then use it to appear on another site. In the case of images, though, most free image hosting services do not allow hotlinking.
Most users dismiss blogspot as merely a blogging platform. Not many knew that Blogger provides one of the best, free image hosting services anywhere on the World Wide Web.
The first thing to do is to create a Blogger account to access to their website. Create a new blog post, and simply click on ‘Add Image’ so as to upload an image. Blogger can support images in jpeg, gif, png, bmp and tiff format. Of course, most bloggers have used this important feature as part of their blog posts. You can add images for up to 1 GB picture storage.
The best thing about Blogger is that it’s totally free, can be viewed excessively, and has no bandwidth limitation. To use Blogger as an image host, do the same procedure as how you add images to your blog posts. This will host your images on the Blogger server. You can save your blog post with image as a draft if you prefer the post to be private. After uploading your image through your blog post, access it by right clicking on the image, and select ‘copy link location’. Paste the link location into a browser window, and you can see the image directly from where it is stored.
To access the image from its direct URL, all you need is to right click on the image and select ‘Copy Image Location. This is important if you’ll need to use hotlinks.
The images you uploaded on blogger can be uploaded to an external website, using the FTP. This feature is perfect for FTP blogs, for these images are uploaded into the FTP account that is hosting the blog instead of the Blogger’s image server. There is an icon if you want to use extra features in the image upload tool, if you want to have more control on where the image will be stored. Plus, everything is free, so get crazy hosting your sites!
Keep in mind that the images and pictures you uploaded is of poorer quality than the original message. Blogger compresses the picture data and information to make loading faster.