How to Select Among the Good Image Hosting Sites
Some people make the mistake of just uploading their images on the first free hosting site that they encounter without first learning the features of that website or of the image hosting services they offer. Remember that no two services are the same. There are bound to be differences. Even minor differences can be big deals for some people.The following are some of the features you probably should be looking when you start picking from the various image hosting sites for your digital photographs.
1. How big is the space allotment?
Since the image hosting service is usually free, the first thing you probably want to find out is the size of the disk space that the site will be giving you. This is essential because if you are planning to upload hundreds of photos, you should think about the file size of your pictures. But if you think you cannot sacrifice the loss of quality that is associated with smaller image file sizes, you will definitely want to find a service that offers bigger space. Bigger is better in this case.
2. What image formats does the site accept?
There are about a dozen image formats currently in use, but the most popular ones are jpg or jpeg, bmp, png, tiff, and also some proprietary formats being used by the various digital camera manufacturers. If your camera saves its pictures in jpg or jpeg, as most do, you have no problem because probably all image hosting sites use that format as their standard. But if you are using other formats, you certainly have to check first with the hosting service if they cater to that format.
3. Does the service offer a paid account?
Now who wants to pay when they can get it for free? Well, while free is good, however, free is not always enough for some people. As mentioned earlier, you might require bigger space to save more photos. Now free accounts are mostly limited in terms of disk space. But if they are offering paid services, it usually comes with larger disk space so you can save all of your photos and the file sizes of the images can even be bigger because of this.
Now choosing the best among the many image hosting sites seems to be tedious work, but remember that it is vital that you end up with the service that fits your image hosting requirements. You will be keeping your digital photos in that site and you want a service that will be there two or even ten years from now so you don"t have to go through all those transferring of image files all over again. Think of the features each of these services are offering and start your selection from there.