What image hosting site do you use?
 

I am looking for a good image hosting site that will house my collected works. I not only want it to host erotic photos but to also not scale the damn pics down.

I was using flickr for a short while and the bastards shut me down because they don't allow collected pictures, has to be original. Also, they don't allow explicit material for some reason. Despite the fact that my account was private.

What I did was create a private group in the adult category and uploaded pics up there. Then linked em. But Yahoo groups scales images down.

So, what image hosting site do you recommend?

I use flickr primarily (never had a problem with hosting explicit material there, also I have a ton of 'collected work' in my account). Overall, I'm pretty happy with the service I get there. I've had a 'pro' account for about 3 years now.

Miscellaneous stuff I throw into a photobucket account.

Your collected works should be housed primarily in your personal HD or dedicated online storage center, preferably in a .rar file. This is to ensure that one day when they are happened upon and seen as a 'waste' by the service you are using, that all of your efforts are not lost because you placed all of your eggs in one basket.

As for image hosters, there are dozens if not hundreds of them on the web, but most of them cater to the adult crowd, and anything that you upload will most likely be available to you and the people you share the images with as clickable-thumbnail forms only.

Hotlinking image services run at a premium, and the most notbable of them are photobucket and imageshack (both do not allow any form of pictures deemed 'offensive').
flicker is also an alternative, but unless you have a pro account and know the intricacies of the rules for uploading, it is basically the same as the two previous, with a more lenient view on 'artistic nudity'.

Imagesocket is the only hotlinking image hoster that I know of that allows adult images to be uploaded, but they need to be clearly marked, and be below a certain size in kB to be displayed fully in a forum or blog.

That being said, I use all of the above. Oh, and I recently discovered tumblr blogs, which by the way I've been meandering around there and hotlinking photos and 'faving them', seems to be an ideal solution to your query.

That's all I know.

For adult-orient photos, I use imagevenue
for SFW photos, I use tinypic.

Granted, I don't use them for photo collections, and I don't pay for their services; I mostly use them for clickable thumbnail links to screencaps for video links on a file-hosting site.

i use photobucket but i dont store anything remotely aadult-like on mine.

i recently ran out of space on my photobucket account, and i had to get another email account just so i can stay with them. PB is neither here nor there, if something else comes along, id take it.

anyone have experience with picasa? i have a few friends that use it, but no feed back as yet

Picasa is Fantastic. I use it for my photos. As in pictures I actually took myself. It's not user friendly though so if you want to use it I suggest you get the software that uploads it for you. I also very much doubt you will run out of space on there as fast.

Thanks to TFPeZ I have amassed 27 links worth of 86 photos and a few of them are on my HD. I am sorta afraid they will go offline (broken link or something) because the pics I've bookmarked are HIGH DEF but can't seem to find a hosting site good enough to host 7MB photographs!

I use photobucket, although today, apparently, I exceeded my bandwidth--oh well, it resets tomorrow.

99.9% of the time, I use ImageShack. I've used them for years. Then I had my own server for a couple years so I just used that. And rarely do I have the need for hosting adult photos. Those are normally emailed or IM'd. ;)

My prob is finding a site that'll host large gifs. Like 4MB and up.

Flickr will let you post full resolution photos. I've used it for years. Re-scaling is purely optional and designated in the Flickr Uploader tool.

Flickr will let you post "collections" as long as you do TWO very important things:

1.) don't designate the copyright so that it looks like it is your "own" work, a Creative Commons work, a public domain work, etc.

2.) designate both the Safety level and the Privacy level. Most people completely ignore these and if the photos are adult-oriented Flickr will delete them unless you self-regulate your images. There are all kinds of options for keeping your adult-oriented photos from being seen or encountered by various types of Flickr users.

Flickr pro accounts are $25/yr for unlimited uploads and full features.

boomspeed.com used to be pretty decent back in the day before flickr and photobucket.

I personally use Picasa for all my stuff now, I just keep it all private and send out links as needed to whoever. I have one directory I keep open that I call my "Craigslist/Freecycle" folder where I put all my pics for anything I post for sale/trade online.

I think Google is even offering something like 20 gigs for $5/year now for Picasa albums.

If you want something that'll never change policies on you, host it yourself. Either locally or by paying a hosting service. The trick is finding a hosting service that's ok with erotica. I know nearlyfreespeech.net will do the trick, if you're ok with the pay-as-you-go idea. Gandi.net might be too, though not entirely sure.

The vast majority of hosting sites you find advertising for $5/mo do not support nsfw material of any kind.

If you need tips to get started hosting it yourself, let us know. The basic version is install wordpress, install something like Zenphoto (or many other excellent image apps,) and then start uploading :thumbsup:

My suspicion is that Flickr gave you the boot because you only had the Privacy thing set, but not the Safety level. What they care about viz. erotica is more the "Safety" level. Then you probably want to make everything private on top of that...

If you have a Pro account and do that I very much doubt that they will mess with you. If you have a free one and are using it that way, they might boot you anyway because they see themselves as a "community" and not an image host. But I've only rarely heard of anyone being thrown off if they'd paid their money and were following the privacy/safety level rules (except for CP, but that's not kosher anywhere obviously).

Other than that ... there's Photobucket, but it's kind of a PITA to work with. I don't really use it. And the accounts run out of bandwidth absurdly quickly, leading to annoying dead links in threads where you've posted images; if I ran a board, I'd probably just block Photobucket links for this reason ... they linkrot really quickly. But they're popular for a reason.

Google's Picasa service is sorta like Flickr but with more privacy controls and less of a "community" focus, which might be better for what you're trying to do.

Although really, what you probably should do is get one of the cheap web hosting plans from somewhere and put your images there (maybe have some minimal index.html file so it's not like you're *just* using the service for your imagedump, but then put your images in /images and ... well, basically just use it as your imagedump).

But the problem is that you are the User From Hell as far as a lot of services are concerned; there's no easy way to make money from what you want to do, so they're not terribly interested in doing it. That means you probably either need to pay for the service, or deal with a really low quality service like Photobucket.

As an alternative ... there are quite a few one-shot services like imgurl; where you upload one file and then you get a random-ish URL to post. These work very well but don't let you assemble a "library" of images or anything. I'm not sure how quickly they expire, though.

imageshack exclusively.

photobucket deleted about 1000 images I had stored there...apparently they want me to pay for it now. this has not been a good year for photo hosting...grrr.

with no minced terms, photobucket may well yet become an official Oxford synonym for 'puritanical' soon.

my best guess: they didn't delete randomly, but removed all of your stocking photos, topless pics, and maybe anything at all that could be construed as a 'sexually-provocative' image; and this might go to as far to say as each and anytime they come across a file entitled 'jenna-jameson_8.jpg', they'll delete that just on principle that Jenna Jameson is a former adult actress, and not even examine the photo content at all to discover that it was me and Jenna at the local S-Expo, both of us fully-clothed (this is but a hypothetical).

That has always been the way with photobucket, but what I am talking about is a complete wipeout of everything I had stored there except for the most recent 25 or so images, regardless of content.

Oh, well, that could be a different thing, then. I had recently noticed in their terms of service that if you do not log in (or others do not view your photos?) for a period exceeding 90 consecutive days, then your account, and all accumulated photos within, will be deleted, forthwith-posthaste.

flickr has the same policy in regards to free users, (which is what I was referring to above as well) so I'm not even sure I still have both of my accounts listed as active, as I do have a tendency to get lost and resurface with a new scarred-face buddy months later.

hmmm, I don't log in a lot, but I know I do at least two or three times a month.
bottom line is, they can do whatever they want.
Flickr, too, even with a pro account.

My previous internet service provider, Comcast, as well as my current provider, Verizon, give you a bunch of free storage space which can be shared and linked. Verizon gives broadband customers a free 250 MB but you can get up to 50 GB, though I think there's a charge.

There is a service out there that will AUTOMATICALLY backup what you have on on-line sites... emails, files, pictures. It's called Backupify. It is a pay service unfortunately, and has some limitations, but not having to do it yourself is a big attraction for me.

The link, if you're interested (and no, I don't have an account or any affiliation with them... just read a review and think it's a good idea ;) ):

Backupify :: Secure Online Backup and Archiving for Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and Wordpress

or read a brief review here:

Backupify Automatically Creates Backups Of Your Online Belongings

Imagevenue.com - NSFW images
imgftw.net - SFW images

If I've got a lot of images to upload, I use IIIUploader.