Free Image Hosting from Image Terminal

Want a quick and easy way to host images (e.g., for blog posts such as this one) without having to go to all of the trouble of signing up for a new account, keeping track of your username and password and so forth? Try ImageTerminal.com. It won't allow you to do all of the fancy things you can do at sites such as Photobucket.com, but it can be useful in some circumstances. If all you need is image hosting for your blog, it may be just what the doctor ordered.

You're limited to 1MB per file upload, but that's pretty easy to achieve. Anyone who knows web design knows that a 1MB JPG or GIF would be considered very large in terms of web design. (In our web design class at Truman College, we were told that it was ideal to keep individual images to somewhere around 40 KB or so. I think that there are definite exceptions, especially for photographers' websites, but you can get a lot done with a fairly small file if you know what you're doing. For example, the "Blue Hosta" image used in this particular blog post is 34.3KB in size. It's a modification of one of my floral photos, formatted for use on a possible CD cover design.)

Since there are no user accounts associated with specific images, there's pretty much an unlimited number of images you can host via Image Terminal.

They do have Terms of Service you'll want to read, but since you have no account to begin with, the most they can do if you violate those terms is to delete specific images if they discover that those images violate the TOS. They can't cancel your account, because like I said, you have no account for them to cancel.

Basically, when you upload images, you get 5 lines of code, each of which is to be copied and pasted into specific types of documents. There are lines for:

• Forum/MySpace
• URL
• Direct URL
• HTML
• BBCode

You may wonder: "What's the difference between URL and Direct URL?" From what I can see, Direct URL presents your image by itself in the upper left corner in the browser, whereas URL presents the image in the middle of the screen, surrounded by several unobtrusive text ads. Direct URL code doesn't show the small ads which appear when one clicks a URL link. Unless you want people to be able to see such ads when they look at your image (which seems unlikely), you'll almost certainly want to use the Direct URL code.

---

NOTE: On another image which I downloaded, I noticed that the image presented when I entered the URL code into the address bar was larger than the image which appeared with Direct URL. So there might be some circumstances in which URL would be superior to Direct URL.

---

The HTML code is for situations where you want to click the image and be taken to a separate page showing that image. Ditto for "Forum/MySpace" and "BBCode", except they're for situations where HTML links or references are not allowed (such as comments on blog pages).

Here's an image I uploaded to the site today, both with and without a link to the site: