Dubbed as the simple image sharer, Imgur is a dead simple image hosting service which offers useful features to us especially bloggers. Many bloggers uses free photo sharing platforms such as Flickr and Photobucket and they somehow has been sticking it out for the past few years. However, Alan (founder of Imgur) tries to rival these huge giants by introducing a platform which is much easier to use, faster, without ads, and of course free.
Unlike most popular image hosts, Imgur doesn’t shows the image which you’ve uploaded but only an image URL, HTML image code (websites / blogs), and a string of code for message boards. Actually I personally prefer a preview of the image on the page itself. In this case, I’d have to click on the direct link to view it and it’s somehow quite troublesome. Also, even though it’s aim is to keep it as simple as possible, however, I hope that Imgur should give users at least three different image sizes to choose from (its image editing tool allows you to change the dimensions of the image). This is essential for a majority of bloggers as some large images may not fit the width of their blog post.
The best feature which Imgur provides is the sharing of photos to social bookmarking websites such as Digg, Reddit, Fark and Del.ico.us with just a click of the mouse and need not to waste time heading to the respective sites to do so. Also, Imgur has no annoying ads nor irritating pop-ups to persuade you to sign up for a premium account. What’s more is that no registration is required, hence reducing time taken to sign up and log-in every time you want to upload an image.
Currently, it only allows up to 2MB file size limit per photo and 3MB if you’ve contributed some donations to the ads-free service. This is a huge difference from the 10MB which Flickr is offering for its free account. It also comes with an image editing tool whereby you can use it to alter the dimensions of your image and turned it clockwise or anti-clockwise.
Overall, I’m quite impressed by Imgur and I believe an increasing number of bloggers will switch to this free service soon as its user-interface is quite well-done too.