Why and How to use Free Image Hosting Services

As a professional photographer or a hobby photographer you want to post your images online for all the world to see.  There are free image hosting services such as Flickr.com etc.

Sometimes you won't want your images resized and in the bad low-quality some of these free photo-hosting services often force upon their users.

You might even want to exclusively show your images from your site alone.
Images, if in very fine crisp quality, can be real large file sizes and not only cause your pages to upload slowly on your visitors' computers, but also cause you to need lots of server bandwidth for file transfers caused by your site visitors viewing your images.

A nice little 'trick' I found - for those of you willing to risk that it may not last for ever and don't mind the bother of the one time uploading and setup  -  is using the services of PhotoBucket.com

What you do is you go there, sign up, upload the images you want hosted by them - in the acceptable file format, like .jpg etc.

Then you copy the code they give you for that image/s and strip it of any unneccessary bits (like additional images and links) which link and promote them, so you are left with a clean code for your image only, no distractions prompting your visitors to join or search for other stuff on photobucket. (Sorry, photobucket )

PhotoBucket also offers cool tools to create photo-slideshows with all kinds of gimmics.

With unlimited bandwidth you need never worry about your site suddenly going offline because your hosting account bandwidth limits were used up for the month…
Ideal not only for heavy trafficed sites, but also if you don't have a gallery, site or blog on your own domain, but use (for a good example) HUBPAGES as your means of online presence and marketing of yourself or others!

Ah, yes, remember also to create the alt="" tags in the image code you'll place on your site. photoBucket enables you to create 'HotSpots' on your image, with different KeyWords (KW) and they use this for the alt="KW1 KW2 KW3…" tag. You don't need to do it- you could add it later when you embed the image on your site.  I always add a title tag as well. This the search engines love and it helps to some extent with site rankings!

Usage Example:

<img src="here goes the URL of hosted image at photobucket" alt="KW1 KW2 blabla" title="can be same as alt tag or variation">

TIP: Title tags can also be used to provide short instructions/ information. When someone mouses over the image the text you placed within the title tag will appear!
A good practice is to also include the KWs - after your call to action or other information or instruction!

If you decide to host all your images yourself, I recommend the host we use. It's super cheap, reliable and they also offer reseller accounts so you can host many different domains for one low price, or host for others and charge them. C-Panel, Fantastico, unlimited FTP, SQL, Emails etc etc.

Please feel free to add your remarks and tips in the comment box below!