Recently, my virtual assistant team and I needed to find an alternative to Photo Bucket for online photo storage and sharing. We were creating some custom ads to jazz up a client's Craigslist marketing. We created beautiful custom ads, full of color with great graphics and, at the end of the day, we were very happy with what we came up with. So, we uploaded them to our client's Photo Bucket account so that we could use the image source code on the Craigslist ad. Imagine my surprise when Photo Bucket decided to delete four of the five custom ads we created because "This image or video violated our terms of use". Huh? But the fifth one was just fine. We were at a loss. So, we had to do find an alternative and FAST!
Flickr, of course, came to the top of our minds. Flickr's great for keeping an online photo album. As are Snapfish, 4Shared and My Photo Album. The problem, however, came when we tried to use the direct link. Unlike Photo Bucket, which gives you a direct link to just the image itself, none of the "direct links" were to the photo. Each one came up in its respective photo album with accompanying background for whichever site it was loaded on. That's when we came across Image Shack.
Image Shack is a free online photo storage and sharing platform similar to Photo Bucket. They allow you to upload photos and videos, create albums that can be shared, add tags and make the images private or public. They also provide embed codes and direct links to place your images wherever you need them to be. They even allow you to add an Image Shack widget to your website so that your website visitors have a direct link to upload photos as long as they have an Image Shack account. You can also upload photos directly to your Image Shack account right from your smart phone via the Image Shack iPhone app, the yfrog for Blackberry or the yfrog for Android. The Image Shack Quick Send feature allows you to upload images to your Image Shack account by emailing them as attachments. This is also compatible with cameraphones. And all of this is FREE!
I can't say enough about how impressed I was to find Image Shack as a useful alternative to Photo Bucket. Dare I say, I may never go back to Photo Bucket again!
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