No matter how you host your blog, whether it’s with Blogger or WordPress, if you want to have images on your site, then you’ll need to think about image hosting. If you pay for your own hosting, then your answer is simple: you can just host on your blog’s server.
For those of you who use a free blogging service, however, you’ll probably need to look at external services, as many free providers don’t offer too much space.
The image host that many Blogger bloggers use is Photobucket. It’s been around for so long, and allows you to edit your images once they’ve been uploaded – useful if you don’t have Photoshop, or if you’ve just noticed something that needs cropping out. There are, of course, various apps for Photobucket, which allow you to upload photos to your space directly from your phone – perfect for blogging away from home. Taken too many selfies? You can upgrade your Photobucket account to give you more space and bandwidth, avoiding the dreaded “bandwidth exceeded” images we’ve all seen before.
One way to avoid those “bandwidth exceeded” images (because there’s nothing more frustrating when you click over to a favourite blog and find a blog post with 8 of those images!) is to use Flickr. Flickr have recently changed what their free and pro accounts get – if you’re a free user, you can upload a whole terabye of photos and videos. Images can be up to 200MB in size, which is perfectly fine for a blog post image, and you have unlimited bandwidth. You can also pay $49.99 per year to upgrade to an ad-free account, which is exactly the same as the free account, but – you guessed it – with no ads. If you feel like splashing out, you can pay $499.99 per year for a “Doublr” account which is again the same as the free account, but givs you 2 terabytes of storage. (If you really did need that much storage, it would probably be cheaper for you to buy some web hosting instead though!) All Flickr accounts offer view counts and referral statistics for your images – it’s always been more of a community based site, but has picked up in popularity again since the relaunch of the iOS app.
If you have a Blogger blog, then you have a Google account, and with this, you also have a Picasa account. Picasa Web Album’s gives you a fairly sizeable 5GB of space shared between your Picasa and your Google Drive, and after the acquisition of Picnik, Picasa has built in image editing. If you need more space – depending how big your images are, you may never need to upgrade – they charge $2.49 USD a month for 25GB, or $4.99 USD for 100GB. Should you need even more than that, Google are happy to sell you up to 16 terabytes! This is where your images go when you upload them through Blogger, and there are no bandwidth issues. Even if you are a WordPress.com blogger, you can still use the Picasa space to host your images.
What do you use to store your images?
Actually, none of the Flickr accounts have stats access any more, unless you still have an old Pro account (sigh. I miss those stats). They do still have view counts on each individual photo, but no referrers any more.
Really? How rubbish! (I still have an old pro account, so assumed it was still the same.) I don’t really understand the logic behind the Doublr account either, why would you pay $500 for 2 terabytes? Just have two free accounts!
I just upload to the server and use WordPress Photon (in the Jetpack plugin) which basically caches the image so it loads faster and takes a bit off of my bandwidth because it goes through the WP.com server instead. Amazon Web Service is kind of similar if you’re not a WP user.
A Dropbox account will do too – you get like 2gb for free and can earn more space or pay for more. Google Drive is similar to this as well, plus you aren’t limited to just photos with them.
I hadn’t thought about using Dropbox for hosting before! I use it to keep my files synced from my laptop to my work computer, but nothing much more than that.
I keep my decent photos on Flickr. I still have an old Pro account but it runs out soon so I’ll be interested to see what changes. However, I also have a community of people I interact with on Flickr who I assume will not be interested in endless scans of book covers, so those I upload directly in WordPress and host with the rest of my site.
I don’t get it… why do you need to host your photos? Why can’t you just upload them from your computer… are their any benefits (sorry if this is a stupid question, still learning)?
Hi Loofie,
Not a stupid question! When writing a blog post, if you put the address of the image as the file location on your computer, then while it would work fine for you, when other readers came to look at it, their browser would be looking for the file in that location on their computer. (If that makes sense?)
By uploading it to somewhere like Flickr (or even using the built in uploader in Blogger), then the file is stored on a server, which any reader will be able to access.
Hope that helps – but just shout if you need any more help!
Hayley
Can You Please Tell Me How to Upload Images on Picasa ??
I use Photobucket and I’ve even bought a Pro account however lately, they seem to be buggy including me not being able to get in my account. This is really annoying especially when I have an important post to publish. Aside from Flickr and Picasa, are there any other image hosting sites that provide premium service?
Hi Cher,
I haven’t heard of many other photo hosts besides those listed in the post – it might be worth looking at going self hosted – you could keep your photos there if you didn’t want to convert your blog from Blogger. I know that essbeevee does that – she has the .co.uk domain for her blog, and has the .com for her self hosted website.
Hmm, I am now contemplating what to do now that Gallery 3 is going into hibernation. I never really considered using WordPress for my photos as well because in my first experiences with it, it seemed like it would be a huge mess with a large number of photos. I did consider flickr, but went with Gallery to keep things on my own site. However, now I am considering flickr again. I have used it a bunch in the past already, and having the different generated sizes available would be fantastic, fast hosting, etc. I also don’t mind them being public. However, it seems like flickr requires you in their rules to link back to the flickr photos page for every image you use. That is unacceptable for my purposes. I don’t want people viewing my site to have zillions of links to go to flickr and then likely clicking one and forgetting about my site. Sure flickr would love it, but not me. I may have to look into Dropbox or something, but it sounds like they don’t want to be hosts either. So I’m not sure what to do if I want to switch away from Gallery 3.