ImageShack

Sometimes it feels like you can't throw a rock without hitting an image sharing host. Between Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, and countless others, you have a seemingly limitless number of options when you want to think about how you want to preserve your special photos. However, most of these sites focus around their ability to offer free image hosting through limiting their features and relying on advertising. While ImageShack once started with the same model, they've since removed their ads entirely and transitioned wholly to a subscription plan. This allows them to provide a cleaner and more robust image sharing platform. While it might not be for everyone, this model makes it ideal for established professionals and those aspiring to be professionals. On a fundamental level, ImageShack isn't all that different from the other guys. You get your own account where you can store photos, either by uploading them directly from your computer or through the use of a website link. As far as it goes, ImageShack could serve as the only host you need for all of your images. Through the use of its cloud services, ImageShack allows unlimited hosting with no caps on the amount of pictures you an store, and that also means that you won't have to scale down the resolution of your photos just to get them to fit. This makes ImageShack an ideal host for businesses, as it can scale up to your needs with a single and unchanging subscription prices. Uploading your photos is a very simple affair, and ImageShack provides you with web links immediately, so you won't have to put much effort at all into populating your professional website or forum with visual content. But ImageShack sees themselves as more than just an image sharing host. They also recognize their potential as a social media platform. Much like Instagram, ImageShack allows you to use the photos hosted through their site as a social outreach tool. You can follow other users, comment on their images, like their photos, and allow the same on your gallery. Since ImageShack is reserved to individuals with subscription accounts, the audience base is smaller, but that also lends is an air of exclusivity. ImageShack is largely made for photographers, and that's reflected in the subscription program's user base. ImageShack even maintains a front page blog that features some of the hottest photos in the network. How much you want to share is completely up to you, as ImageShack provides a rather robust range of configuration options. Anything from a single photo to an entire album can be made available with just the click of a button, and you can easily adjust who can see what. The ability to create galleries and assign them tags offers a greater amount of filtering control when looking through your own photos or browsing the collections of the photographers you follow.