Image hosting sites
October 17, 2022 7:37 AM   Subscribe

What's the best place to host an image online?

Sometimes I want to put an image online, e.g. I want to share a reference image online, or to ask AskMe to identify a wotsit I found at a junk shop.

I'd like not to worry about account history (i.e. other images attached to that user name on the image site), and ideally have all metadata stripped on upload. I'd like it to be easy to use and reliable, and as visually streamlined as possible.

Imgur seems the most commonly used site, but I don't have a sense of its reputation for privacy and it is sometimes blocked in places where I travel.
posted by tavegyl to Computers & Internet (5 answers total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
With Imgur, you can upload an image without having to create an account, so effectively anonymous. The flipside of this is that you can never delete that image afterwards.

You can create an account to allow you to hide images publicly (as well as delete them), but then of course you have an account tied to your images. Also "hidden" images on Imgur are technically still available to anyone.

From the Imgur documentation:
No matter what your privacy settings are, every image can always be accessed and viewed by anyone who types in that exact URL. No image uploaded to Imgur is ever completely hidden from public view. This is mainly to ensure that Imgur, which allows anonymous postings, will not be used as a platform for illegality.
In terms of metadata, they say they strip all Exif data but there have also been reports that they sell that Exif data, maybe? If you're worried about this, there are software/apps that will do this for you before upload.
posted by jeremias at 8:20 AM on October 17, 2022 [1 favorite]


Imgur is what I use too, but I don't know about where you travel and why/how it is blocked, so I can't speak to that. I find it to be imperfect but less sleazy than most other options.

On the privacy topic, one thing I will say is that hosting images and video is expensive (and a pain in the back from a legal and compliance standpoint), so if you're using a free service for it, you should expect that they're going to be doing something to at least offset those costs, if not profit. Advertising, tracking, etc. Imgur does have a paid tier, but I have no idea if it's enough to cover their costs. I kind of doubt it is. So if avoiding any kind of advertising or tracking is of the utmost importance to you, you might want to consider a true paid hosting service, but that of course makes it a little bit harder to eliminate any mechanism for finding that two different images were both shared by the same person.
posted by primethyme at 9:28 AM on October 17, 2022


At some point Imgur stopped letting me upload from my phone without being logged in/using the app, so I switched to imgbb. It's fine.
posted by phunniemee at 11:05 AM on October 17, 2022


I use imgbb because they turned up in a search result. Here is their privacy policy. I don't know what it means but to my inexpert skim I'll probably keep using them. It lets you choose how long the image stays online, which I like.
posted by aniola at 11:08 AM on October 17, 2022


This is mostly convenient for me because I use Discord a lot, but I often just message an image to myself on Discord. You can then click "show original" to get the URL.

I'm not sure if they strip EXIF, but afaik all social media sites do this as a matter of course. The main caveat is that there's an 8MB file size limit.
posted by neckro23 at 12:58 PM on October 18, 2022


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