I can't dictate where people choose to host their images, but I really wish people would stop using Photobucket. Yes, I have stuff hosted there, but those are from a time when the site was less frustrating to work with, and I've been too lazy to move everything.

Some of the reasons I don't like Photobucket include:

• It's super slow. Sometimes it's not so bad, but too often it seems to take forever to load an image, and sometimes it just gets stuck loading. It also slows down everything else.


• Attempting to avoid the slowness of Photobucket by directly linking to an image doesn't always work. Most of the time, clicking on what is supposed to be a direct link to the image itself, just goes to the image on Photobucket with the ads and borders and everything.


• Adblock has to be disabled to zoom in on images and to save images (which I have only ever done with my own images).


• Annoying ads, including ones that cover the whole page, that I am forced to deal with due to being forced to disable Adblock.


• Sometimes, it starts to load an image only to skip over it and redirect to some other site instead.


• Saving my own images so I can move them is a slow and painful process, which is not helped by the fact that Photobucket automatically tacks on "~original" at the end of every file name, which I have to be sure to get rid of before saving it, otherwise the image will be unusable.


• Most importantly, any publicly viewable image on Photobucket can be purchased as a print, on shirts, mugs, mousepads, etc. by anyone. That includes images uploaded without the artist's permission or knowledge. So Photobucket could be making money off your art without you even knowing about it.

I am also not fond of TinyPic, which has similar issues with direct-linking, and sometimes an image won't even show up. At least it's not as slow as Photobucket.

Alternative image hosting sites:

• Imgur
(just be careful, the community there can be toxic, try to avoid looking at other images)

• Postimage


• CubeUpload (no image compression)

If you have a Tumblr account, you can make private posts, which still works for hosting images. The downside is the long url, but that's where tinyurl comes in handy. Also finding the post later might be difficult, and it seems the image url isn't permanent.

You can also link directly to images on DeviantArt and Toyhouse. You might want to use tinyurl with DA, too.