Free Image Hosting Sites [ Updated List ]

Currently, there are 70 free image hosting sites that will help you to share your photos with friends, family, or even the whole internet. Just upload your digital photos (usually there is a drag and drop interface), create a private or public gallery and that's it.

There are even hosts with unlimited storage, so feel free to upload all the images that you would want to share!

And if you are looking for speed, check out the fast image hosting page where are all the hosts are sorted by regularly checked response time.

New content: How to share screenshots online?, Photo printing services, How to securely delete images?, Get free photos, Backup, How to edit photos & pictures, Online editors

view list of all 70 free photo hosting services »

How to edit pictures?

You've taken a great set of photos from a recent family trip and are eager to share them with your loved ones. But wait, before immediately upload or email the photos out.

You need to ensure they're properly edited and framed. Often, an otherwise great photo may need cropping to focus the visitor's attention on a particular part of the photo. Sometimes you need to edit out "red-eye" from an image. Or to enhance the color or contrast from an image.

Best photo editors & tools (my favourites)

• GIMP 2.10.36 - open source cross-platform image editor, powerful but sometimes are users a little bit lost in it. Runs on GNU/Linux, OS X, Windows ...
• Paint.net 5.0.12 - free photo editing software with many powerful functions
• Riot 2024.1 - easy to use, one click image optimizer with great results, the best I have found and use
• Irfan View 4.664.65 - fast image viewer, very small (only 3MB)

Online photo editors

Before, advanced image editing was only possible through the expensive desktop tool like Photoshop. But today, many of these techniques are possible through web applications, which allow you to enhance, rotate, resize, blur or sharpen and edit your photos online.

If you want to make only basic editing like add shapes, text with special effects, no problem. But you will also find many of the more powerful editing features from expansive, desktop editors such as digital effects, customizable fonts, layering, morphing, retouching, saturation editing, brightness corection, coloration and many more photo effects.

TIP: Several photo editing apps can connect with image sharing sites, allowing you to seamlessly update and edit your uploaded files on the fly.

Edit and optimize images online

• Photopea - free online editor supporting PSD, XCF, Sketch, XD and CDR formats (Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, Sketch App, Adobe XD and CorelDRAW). Very intuitive to use.
• BeFunky - makes your photos fabulous with easy to use yet powerful editing and manipulation tools, good also as a collage maker
• Pixlr - comes in two versions, the full Pixlr photo editor and Pixlr Express
• Optimizilla - compress up to 20 JPG or PNG images at once
• Compressor.io - JPEG, PNG, GIF and SVG supported, lossless or lossy compression

Do you want more options? Here is an updated list of online editing tools.

Here is a great tool that will help you to enlarge images very easily and without losing quality - ImageUpscaler. It's free to use and the results are really good.

How to create a screenshot?

• On Windows 10, just press WinKey + Shift + s
• On Mac, press Ctrl + Shift + 4

Be sure to backup your photos!

Photos are irreplaceable! You cannot take another photo of your daughter celebrating the first birthday. Be sure that all your precious photos are backed up. I back up everything to a NAS (network attached storage / a better external harddrive) that automatically uploads to a cloud storage, plus I use Google Photos, so it's almost bulletproof.

My recommendation for users is: if you don't plan to print big posters, use Google Photos. You can upload an unlimited amount of photos in high resolution (not full resolution, but very high). If you need something better, purchase NAS.

Google Photos - very popular unlimited high quality storage for free ended on 1st June 2021. The storage price is same as for lossless image hosting. Read more at Google »

Picture formats / best use

• JPG - photos
• GIF - simple drawings and animations, limited by 256 colors
• PNG - images with transparency, sometimes photos
• WebP - new format from Google, high quality, better optimization than others, but currently not supported in Safari
• AVIF - modern format with even better compression than WebP, but currently supported only in Chrome and Opera