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I’ve been looking around for alternatives to image hosting powerhouse Flickr for a little while (well, since my pro account expired around April), and have been left wanting.

I’ve investigated sites like Google’s Picasa & Photobucket, as well as hosting my own image gallery using Gallery2 – all of which have left me thinking I may as well just go back and pay my $24.95 pro account fee to Flickr and carry on as I was.

Here’s the reasons why:

* Flickr’s powerful API allows many sites to include flickr functionality, from Facebook to WordPress – and I am a complete social networking whore.

* All of my relevant photos are uploaded to flickr already, and using an alternative service means going through the rigmarole of downloading each photo in turn (as there’s no way to batch download), and re-uploading them to another service, if the service doesn’t support flickr imports.

* Flickr is just damn good, and extremely popular… as well as having several friends using the site already too.

* Flickr’s service is not expensive – the free services are sill damn good, despite only allowing you to see 200 of your photos. Their pro account offers unlimited storage & uploads as well as their new video upload service too. The best alternatives I’ve seen still seem to limit the available storage and/or bandwidth.

Flickr is the best image host in my opinion

In short – Flickr is by far the best image hosting service available on the web today. Though if I’d never used the service before, and wasn’t too bothered about social networking in general, I’d most likely host my own image storage gallery using software like Gallery2.

But finances allowing, I’ll be re-subbing to Flickr soon hopefully.

How about you? What service do you use, and why? Do you pay for a hosting service, or stick with the free options?

Popularity: 3% [?]

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 08:00 and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.