Image Hosting Services

Your own image hosting may not be right for everyone

It may be completely wrong for some. Whether or not you host your own images boils down to a few simple decisions. This blog tries to give you a few answers to these questions. To host or not to host.

Image Hosting is actually a very simple idea

An image that you see appear online can either be hosted by the owner of that image, or can be outsourced to a third party like Google Photos, Flickr or any of the Thousands of other image hosting services websites. That’s a simplistic view of it, but it’s enough to give you the general understanding of what image hosting is.

There are a number of image hosting services questions for you to consider when you are deciding what is going to work best for you. It is important to know that this is not a situation where there is a “right” or “wrong” answer. There is only what is right for you and what is not right for you.

What to look for in a Photo Storage company. A good photo hosting service should offer six things:

>> Space: It should have plenty of storage to keep all of your photos in one place over the years at a competitive cost

>> Quality: Your photos should be preserved in all their original high-resolution content, not compressed beyond recognition

>> Ease of use: You want to be able to upload photos, edit and share them easily

>> Ease of access: Finding or searching for photos by date, tags or other means should be art of the package

>> Share-ability: A good photo website enables sharing photos as easy as taking them, allowing you to post pictures to other sites like Facebook, Twitter…

Image Hosting – The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

The Good: Convenience

It can be more convenient for you to host your images with a third party Website who specializes in image hosting services, there are a few different reasons why this is the case. The image now becomes “their problem” so to speak. You’ve employed them to host that image for you, and now it’s their responsibility to do just that, which means you don’t need to worry about establishing and maintaining that image as a part of your Website. If you have a small business or you’re just going to host the image as a part of your personal web site or hobby site, you may well consider the investment required to establish and run the server is more than you’re willing to accept. With image hosting services, however, you make the most of their Services, which is going to be kept running optimally and likely will be as modern as possible. All of which you can get a more reliable image hosting service without any of the headaches.

The Good: Experience

Image Hosting Services go to great lengths to make the process as simple and as easy as possible for you. All you need to do is provide them with the image you want them to host for you, and they will do the rest. It really is as simple as that. Everything requires the investment of time to learn how to do properly, and image hosting is no different. Image hosting specialists will already have the necessary knowledge to host the image safely and reliably and you will have the opportunity to make the most of that without any sort of need to make that time investment yourself. All of this frees you up your attention to better focus on other things.

The Bad: Cost

Many cheaper image hosting websites for personal use offer their services free of charge; some of them don’t even require you to create an account in order to host the image. This may seem tempting to small businesses looking to cut costs wherever possible. It is not advisable for any business. Image hosting is an investment, a small one, but when you pay for image hosting services with a professional supplier you’re getting access to a host of benefits that you simply don’t when you choose to use a service that doesn’t charge. In most all cases, you will get faster and more reliable servers with a paid image hosting service. If you run a website that’s essential because you can’t afford to have the server your image is hosted on crashing every five seconds because it’s not fit for that purpose or because it has been overloaded. You also get a degree of support, which means that if you encounter any issues you always have someone to help you through the situation.

The Bad: Complexity

With image hosting services, you’re basically bringing another person into the chain, which always runs the risk of making things more complicated. This means that you have to send the image you want to be hosted to someone else, who then will host it for you, rather than just choosing the image and hosting it yourself. There’s also the risk that a Website may need maintenance or may go down, in which case your image may become temporarily unusable. Most companies schedule maintenance for times when there will be the minimal possible intrusion, and maintenance is necessary, but accidents always happen. But also a Website or Server you run could also go down. The reality of it is that the image hosting specialists will have their servers back up and running long before you likely could yourself.

The Ugly

Unless you’ve specifically purchased the copyrights to all your photos you probably do not ever want to put them on these and websites like these that we highly do NOT recommend.

Facebook

Facebook is good for attracting business. But their “Terms Of Use” which have many loopholes and allow them to use the photos (and all data that you publish on the social networking giant) for whatever reason they may want. Facebook also backs up your photos to other hard drives for this purpose. If you’re a beginner, you may want to keep the photos off of Facebook as even deleting them still means that Facebook has it backed up and may still use it. Once again, proceed with caution. The last thing that a photo enthusiast will want is seeing a photo that they uploaded being sold as an ad or used somewhere.

Photobucket

Does anyone use Photobucket anymore? If you’re considering it know that Photobucket is the ultimate platform to allow a user to send their photos out everywhere. In this way, it can easily share your photos to your Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, forums, etc. With this there is very little to privacy control. All your photos are either private or public with no in-between option. On top of this, there is very little storage space and Photobucket pro accounts aren’t worth the price when you weigh it against its many competitors.

Shutterfly

Shutterfly sounds like they offer a lot of options to free users. Freebies include unlimited storage and 50 free 4×6 prints if you so choose. Behind that though is something hidden away in the Terms of Use under Submissions Section:

“You will retain ownership of such Submissions, and you hereby grant us and our designees a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicense able (through multiple tiers), assignable, royalty-free, fully paid-up, perpetual, irrevocable right to use, reproduce, distribute (through multiple tiers), create derivative works of, and publicly display and perform (publicly or otherwise) such Submissions, solely in connection with the Service (including without limitation for purposes of promoting the Service).”