skreidle's Free Photo Hosting report:

(Updated as more sites are discovered or changed, but may be outdated if they change and I don't know about it)

Also see Maryam's House of Image Hosting, which lists several mine doesn't plus scads of sites that don't allow remote linking.

Good:

DigitalStar.com
No info at the moment, just a recommendation by jlbmedia.

PhotoBucket
(Recommended by jlbmedia)
"Currently, if you give photobucket any money at all, they remove all restrictions on your account. Not that there were many to begin with. For this, and other reasons, I heart my photobucket account. -- damnitnicole, 4/28/04

communities.msn.com
"If you go to communities.msn.com and make your own (or join someone else's, for that matter) you can upload pictures and use them offsite without a 'hosted by' banner or anything. Sometimes the quality's a little off, but I think it varies." (Recommended by electricmonk)

Not as good--not free, or limited:

www.fotki.com
"In order to continue provide the high level of service and add new features you have been requesting, we would like to introduce a Premium account for $30 a year effective today. Don't panic! Your pictures are completely safe. There is a grace period until November 9th, 2001."
Basic (free) members will have, (among other things):
10 MB photo storage limit
Originals will be stored for 4 weeks only
No external photo linking

www.20m.com
Web hosting site, offering 20MB free, but no remote linking or FTP access unless you sign up for a premium service (starting at $5.95/mo). (Recommended by iamjanjan)

www.homestead.com
Web hosting site, offering 25MB space starting at $50/yr. (Recommended by understandingii)

www.htmlpublishing.com
5MB space or 200 files, no file larger than 150KB, no adult materials. (Recommended by pcontrol)

www.boomspeed.com
Starts off well:
"FREE 1 Meg Hosting account. (No, we will NOT start charging for these!)
Upload your own images for auctions
Ability to rename and delete files
ALLOWS outside linking to your auctions!
FREE Email account (coming soon)"
Ends not as well (from a free standpoint):
"Use of Boomspeed for linking to anything other than auction images is restricted to Charter accounts only. Only charter accounts may be used for linking images to chat boards, websites, hosting of web pages (other than non-commercial support pages), etc. eBay ME pages are considered auction usage and is allowed with FREE accounts. Free accounts may also be used to host: Help, Support, Docs and Educational pages which do not consume a reasonable amount of resources."
(Charter accounts are $5.75 a month and you get 100 MB) (Recommended by callmemaeve)

www.virtue.nu
Used to allow offsite linking from their members' sites, but now only does so for paid accounts. (Also, they're slow in my experience.) 20MB storage.
"We have detected a hotlinking error. Hotlinking is when you link to images or NON html files on envy.nu from another host. Hotlinking is not allowed for our FREE Accounts. Hotlinking is allowed for our paid accounts. Your account can be upgraded in the user section when you have logged in."

www.angelfire.com
Apparently AngelFire allows remote image linking, if you pay for their upgraded service. (So says neverenough27)
"Also: Angelfire's pages are riddled with illegal cookies that try to plant themselves through hotlinked images as well, causing hell for those of us who have our browsers set to refuse illegal cookies. My browser has actually crashed more than once because of too many images linked on Angelfire in one page. (It's something like 4 cookies per page, and each image is a different page... ugh.)" -- damnitnicole, 4/28/04

www.imageevent.com
Looks pretty good, explicitly allows direct linking, though it's really designed for album hosting. (Recommended by iamom)
Update, 4/3/02: Got an "This Image Cannot be Hosted for Trial Accounts. Once upgraded, this image will appear" warning on an image.

photos.onebigvillage.com/VillagePhotos.com
Used to look better. Dedicated to photo hosting. Had a 20MB/day bandwidth limit, upgradeable for free over time, then 8MB/day, now 5MB/day. So, try to keep pictures reasonable--especially if you're posting to LJ where a lot of people will be loading the image. Tags the pix with their address (on the image), but that goes away (or used to) with enough "points" accumulated as well. Additionally, they cancel your account if you don't log in for 30 days. (Recommended by CoyPixie, updated 4/3/02 and 9/27/02 by azurelunatic)

www.xoasis.com
20MB space. Allows remote image linking, FTP access to web space, online file management, mail forwarding, POP3 mail service, and many other features. However, it is frequently down, FTP is slow with a 60-second idle timout, and tech support is unresponsive. (Recommended by ossie)

liquid2k.com
Free 20MB, no banners. 30-day inactivity results in account deletion. (Recommended by adamskisaucer)

www.250free.com
250MB storage, allows linking. Transfers limited to 500MB/mo (average 16.7MB/day) for free accounts, double that for Premium. TOS disallows adult content, as well as using the account solely for storage--must have actual content as well. (Recommended by vegetablechild)

www.ranchoweb.com
Offers paid webhosting and free/paid image hosting.
Image hosting: Free gets you 1MB storage and page counters; each additional $5/mo gets you 5MB more.
Web hosting: 50/100/300MB storage, 4/6/10GB xfer/mo, 5/10/30 email accts, for $6/$9/$14/mo

www.pair.com
Offers low-cost web hosting, allows offsite linking with limited xfers, up through full webmaster services. On the cheap end is their FTP account, at $5 setup plus $5/mo, giving 100MB storage, 100MB xfer/day, and domains for $15 setup plus $1/mo. (Recommended by dstroy)

www.picturestage.com
50MB space, designed for album hosting, looks good. (Recommended by understandingii)
Negative update:
"If you upload pictures to picturestage.com, you agree to let them rip you off (basically) if they feel like doing that..

"While you will retain ownership of the copyright or license in the content posted by you, you agree that all content posted by you shall become part of a database in the Site, and that XXXX will own the database and copyright in any derivative works based on the content. In addition, you warrant that all so-called moral rights in those materials have been waived. Neither XXXX, XxxXxxx nor any third party using the content in accordance with this section will be obligated to pay you any royalties or other compensation for use of the content."

Which basically means that.. every picture you upload to their servers, they own the right to use as they see fit, without you getting a single cent, nor being able to, in any way, stop them..
Now.. if you're an amateur-anything, you might not bother that much.. but.. well.. if you're anything close to serious about photography ant art etc.. and might think about selling images etc.. you might wanna know that kind of info.."
Also, the link to a given image changes after 3 months for "security reasons". -- luka91
More: http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=luka91&itemid=162763

On the plus side:
They had like tons of FAQs to wade through.. but somewhere in there, I saw that they limit the time you could do an external linking to a picture.. (even if I was actually looking for the copyright info)

It's kinda sad, because.. Picturestage is the host I've seen, with the best service (You upload to a general storage-spage, then you create albums out of those images, which means you can use the same image in several albums.. You can even do variations of the same image, for various albums (without having to upload a new version) since the displayed image is bound to the album they're in). And you can password protect indidvidual albums, and give guests a specific password. Which would mean, if I posted a nude pic.. I could have it nude in a password-protected album, and display the same image with blurs in a public album).

That way.. I would've used them, for sure.. if they didn't had those negative things about it (Guess they have to get paid for offering those 50 MB in some way) -- luka91

photos.msn.com
"It looks like they discontinued the free storage service. You now need to subscribe to MSN 8... $21.95/month." -- mizanchan, 7/24/03
(Formerly recommended by csteph, as it didn't require signing up for Hotmail or MSN email, just creation of an MSN ID. URL a bit hard to get, 30MB free storage as long as you're active; Storage meter; if the MSN Photos account was inactive for 6mo, photos would be permanently deleted.)

Bad:

Geocities, Angelfire, and Tripod do not allow remote linking to images they host, with free accounts. You may be able to see them if you own them, but no one else can--so you'd have to either create a web page dedicated to those images, or find another host so you can link to them.

www.ephotoalbum.org
"We're no longer accepting new user accounts and have halted service to Free Members. Please keep posted on the news for the most current updates. We were forced to shut down due to member abuse and lack of user supported funding. We currently are a closed server only offering the service to a select few members."

www.photoisland.com
Seems to offer 50MB free space, but offsite links to pictures will only live for 3 months.

www.digitalfridge.com
"just a note on digitalfridge.. i use them and they are not very good for offsite linking, they change the url to the pictures like every week (its quite annoying). i wouldnt recommend them for lj type stuff." -- rainb0wbrite

www.imagestation.com
Unlimited storage. Formerly allowed offsite linking, but didn't promote it anywhere.
"www.imagestation.com doesn't allow linking anymore. They used to but with no announcement they recently changed that policy. Pixel nazis." -- gravity

www.clubphoto.com
Used to allow offsite linking, but has been blocking LJ as a whole due to high bandwidth usage. (8/02)

PictureTrail.com
Formerly, PictureTrail made an exception to allow LiveJournal to pull pics from their servers:

"From: somebody important at PictureTrail.com
Subject: Picturetrail and Livejournal
hi, our servers now allow livejournal website to pull pics off our servers." (Indirectly recommended by signe)

Unfortunately, as of 2/1/03, they will no longer host pictures for LJ. (Update by lisavee)

www.printroom.com
Formerly offered 200MB free storage (plus $0.20/MB above that) and allowed remote linking (albeit with a "Hosted by.." strip at the top); only supported JPGs.
Unfortunately:

Printroom.com Policy Change
Image hosting for 3rd party sites (Ebay, LJ, etc.) will be discontinued on 2/1/03. Photo sharing, albums, printing and other services will not be affected.

(Update by lisavee)

www.shutterfly.com
"Per our terms and conditions, Shutterfly does not allow customers to "hotlink" images from Shutterfly to a third party website. Due to an increasing number of people doing this, we had to disable this ability on our site. Please note that the images are still in your Shutterfly account, however the external links to them are no longer valid.

Sincerely,
Jonathan
Shutterfly Customer Service
customerservice@shutterfly.com" (4/27/04, update via supportlounge)


HOME

Last update 8/18/04 SK