ImageShack

ImageShack is one of the better knowing image sharing websites on the internet, they do offer subscription based services but most users sign up for free accounts. Most of their revenue is generated from advertising and partnership deals. ImageShack has received a lot of positive reviews with it being one of the fastest growing sites on the internet. The site was launched in 2003 and ever since has grown in popularity because of the range of features and ease of use. The main page of the site is where you can upload images quickly and easily, you just need to select the image that you want to upload. The site supports BMP, SWF, TIFF, GIF, PNG or JPEG. Free accounts have a limit of 5MB per image; paid accounts have a 10MB limit per file. If any image is uploaded in TIFF or BMP formats then it will be converted to PNG automatically. Once the image has been uploaded you will then be directed to a page which shows a number of different URL’s each of which show a different version of the image. The URLs are not disclosed to anyone else, this means only people you give the URL to will be able to access your images. During 2008 image shack started to try to prevent direct linking to images because this cost them bandwidth but did not offer any advertising revenue. All images will stay on the site for ever as long as certain criteria are met. If the user abuses the terms and conditions then the image will be removed. The image will also be inaccessible if the image consumes over 300MB on bandwidth in one hour. If the image isn’t accessed at all for a year then it will be removed. You can also delete your images if you want. ImageShack.us was founded in November 2003 by Jack and Alexander Levin. The company is based in California, USA and has received $10 million in funding in 2007. Competitors of the site include Photobucket and Flickr. Uploading images is very easy, you can even create an account at the same time you are uploading your first image. The design of the site is much more basic than some of the other image hosting sites. It’s also possible to upload videos instead of just images and you can link to certain URL’s instead of uploading the content. The site is quite nice looking once you manage to get past the two huge adverts on the main page of the site. These are very distracting and quite annoying. Many of the adverts are also from lotteries or other things that sound like scams so it’s a little bit off putting. Uploading photos is very easy and only takes a couple of minutes. It’s also possible to search for other images, but every page has large adverts on it. Signing up for an account with Image Shack is easy and you can even do it when you first upload a photo. It’s also possible to fill out a fairly basic registration form, you need to enter your email address, choose a username and fill out some optional information if you wish. You will then be sent an email which contains your automatically generated password. You then need to sign in and change this password to something that is actually possible to remember. You can create a free account, but you can also register for a paid subscription. These are available at $8 per month, or there are 6 month or 12 month subscriptions available. If you sign up to a paid account then you get a 10MB per file limit instead of the basic 5MB limit, unlimited uploads, unlimited bandwidth, customer support, upload tools, backups of your images. Image Shack is a great site for anyone looking to share images or videos easily but don't want to host these on their own server. ImageShack makes it easy to post the images and videos to your profile or blog. The site is one of the most popular image sharing sites on the internet at the moment.