Image hosting is like having a family photo album to show to everyone who comes to your home, but instead you can share that album with people miles and miles away or across the globe. The way it works is that an individual uploads digital images to an image hosting website and then that website stores the image on its server. A code is revealed to the user for sending to friends to view the image or images in an album stored on the server.
Some sites allow FTP access to upload multiple images at one time. There is usually maximum image size restrictions per site or maximum bandwidth to be used per user. Most image hosting services are free to a certain bandwidth. One thing to keep in mind is that with image hosting, your images are on the web and available to the public. For larger images, most individuals pay for the hosting service and also purchase web hosting to have their images on their own website.
There are many different ways to host and display images, from photo sites to social networking sites to just pure image hosting sites. Sites offer their own special tools sometimes unique to their site such as photo blogs, slideshow capabilities, comment section under each image, resizing, editing red eye, uploading remotely through a camera phone or IPhone, etc.
So why use a host for your images? Mostly, unless you have your own website hosted, it gives you the ability to share images with friends and family via a simple link. With digital image sizes often being large enough to slow down an email server, it is too cumbersome to send more than one high quality image to someone via email. Also, for the recipient to open the image is too time consuming as they click on each image to open or save to their own computer. Sending a link to an entire album that the recipient can save to look at over and over again at their leisure is easier and more efficient.
As technology grows it makes our lives simpler. Maybe next year there will be an even easier way to share our lives with those we love. Keeping up with technology can sometimes be hard, as it changes so quickly. Pick and choose the things that work for you. You don’t have to keep up with the Joneses and have every new technology that hits the market. But for some things, even die hard grandparents who like to do things the old fashioned way, are turning to new technology for things that have really gone mainstream.
