There are plenty of image hosting sites out there. You need them mainly for posting images to Web forums such as phpBB. The free bandwidth provided by these sites are also increasing all the time. In this post, I will look at some of the best free image hosting Websites. I only consider those sites which allow direct linking.

Flickr! - Yes, this is probably the most widely used service now. There are important terms of use - You are supposed to use it only for personal use and that you must provide a link back to Flickr if the image is hosted on a different site. Also free accounts has a bandwidth limitation of 100MB per month.

Picasa Web Album - Similar to Flickr. The free service provides 250GB of web space.

ImageShack - This is intended for hot linking of images and is quite popular. Allows 100MB of transfer per image for an hour. There is no upload limit.

Photobucket - The free service has a limit on the size of the photo (1024×768). You get 1GB of space and 10GB of total bandwidth per month. If you don’t use your account for 90 days, it gets deleted!

xs.to - If you are looking for quick and dirty image hosting, this is ideal! Allows you to host image instantly without registration. Also allows for hotlinking. Maximum of 500 files per user can be uploaded.

Yeah, I know there are more photo hosting sites. But I think one of the above 5 will suffice. But in case you want to check out more, see the following(I haven’t reviewed all of them!). But I did verify that the sites are up and running!

Alphabetical list of free image hosting sites

http://app02.bonpoo.com/file.htm
http://www.filehost.to
http://www.fotopic.net
http://www.freeimagelibrary.com
http://www.imagecave.com/
http://www.imageheap.com
http://www.imagevenue.com/
http://www.imagexoom.com
http://www.myimagebuddy.com
http://www.myimagehosting.com
http://www.myonlineimages.com/
http://www.photoserver.us
http://www.picsplace.to
http://www.realimagehost.com
http://www.simpload.com
http://www.solisstyle.com/ims/
http://www.thefreeimagehosting.com
http://www.thepicturebin.com
http://www.tinypic.com
http://www.watotron.com/watupload/
http://www.yesalbum.com/
http://www.YourUpload.com (NSFW - damn popups)