Image Sharing Sites help you in storing, sharing your multimedia files via the internet and save space on your laptop or desktop computer.
If you don’t want to depend on an external platform for storing your images, you can build your fast WordPress website and host your images there.
But it comes with a lot of limitations such as slow server, database issues, and server space running out.
So, you need an image-sharing site to handle everything for you.
In this article, I am sharing with your some of the most highly-rated image-sharing sites that offer a lot of features for free.
If you still plan on building hosting images on your WordPress, I recommend CloudInnovare for server optimization and speed optimization.
Their cloud-based tools will help you in optimizing images, JS, and CSS files, and eventually, score better on speed tests.
Image Sharing Sites: Google Photos
Google Photos is the most powerful cloud-based photo-sharing platform on this list.
Various features include an ad-free interface, exceptional facial recognition, and seamless integration with smartphones and other Google platforms.
You get 15GB of free data and once your cross that threshold, you will need to upgrade to a premium option starting at just $1.99/mo.
On top of all those features, it also comes with some level of enhancement and editing tools.
If you are using Gmail and Android devices, Google Photos will feel pretty natural to work with.
Flikr
Flikr offers much more storage space in its free plan.
With 1TB of free storage, you don’t have to worry about upgrading to a premium account for a long period.
So, it is a big alternative to Google Photos.
If we compare features, it offers awesome recognition, geo-tagging, keyword tagging and people tagging online photo editing tool, and traffic stats.
All the images are optimized for faster loading.
Image Sharing Sites: SmugMug
What’s the most important part of photo-sharing?
It’s the quality of the photo.
Most photo-sharing platforms will compress your images dropping a few pixels here and there.
In the long run, you end up losing a lot of quality.
SmugMug is known for preserving quality and sharpness in images.
With SmugMug, you can also create your photography portfolio online for free.
1x
1x is a curated photo sharing and portfolio website with more than 16,000 curated photos. You can purchase a photo for printing purposes.
It’s a tad bit different than Google Photos, Flikr, and Dropbox.
You don’t use photographs for free and there are restrictions on how many photos you can upload. If you are a free user, you may upload up to 10 photos per week.
This is more than enough for a photographer who just wants to share their best work each month.
Image Sharing Sites: Zenfolio
Zenfolio is a photography portfolio website.
It lets you share your work with others online.
You can build your photography portfolio website and showcase your talent to prospects.
So, you can classify Zenfolio as a photography website builder.
Website building is a pretty complex process even with a website builder but Zenfolio’s website builder is beginner-friendly and easy to use.
This makes Zenfolio the perfect platform for people looking to get started with their photography business.
You can also optimize some keywords in your post to make it SEO friendly and you are all set to go.
If you want to offer consultation services through your photography portfolio, you need a schedule planning platform such as Trinitio or Calendly.
Trinitio offers far more features at the same price tag and comes with the best possible customer support.
Pixpa
Pixpa is another great photography page builder that’s popular with college students and graduates school participants.
More than professional needs, Pixpa is used for home and school purposes. So, it has to be beginner-friendly and easy to use.
Furthermore, Pixpa also offers a range of templates that you can choose to roll out your photography website.
The only downside to Pixpa is that it doesn’t have any free plan. You have to sign up as a premium member to make use of this platform.
I believe the number of features and the intuitive dashboard justifies that price tag.
Image Sharing Sites: Behance
Behance is another portfolio website that is a bit different than other portfolio websites.
It doesn’t offer any page builder options but you can create a customized profile page with all your best work.
Behance is now run by Adobe, so you can expect a strong community of millions of artists on this platform.
Not to mention that Behance’s seamless integration with all things Adobe makes it the default choice for people who extensively use Photoshop and make money selling their art.
At the time of writing, Behance offers a free plan with which you can easily share your best work.
Behance is a wonderful social networking website for Photographers, Illustrators, and digital artists.
If you a logo designer, web designer or illustrator, you’ll find Behance to be a wonderful place to share your work and portfolio.
Image Sharing Sites: Dropbox
Dropbox is the almighty file-sharing cloud-based tool.
Dropbox revolutionized file sharing through the internet and became a reason why there are so many cloud-based file sharing platforms today.
Unlike other image-sharing sites, you don’t get a page builder, profile page, or anything that can be used to attract business opportunities.
Dropbox is your “no-nonsense” file sharing platform that comes with a free account that you can use up to 2GB. Once you reach that threshold, you can easily upgrade.
When you compare it with its close competitor, Google, it may not look like a good deal.
Google Drive offers 15 GB free storage and also offers far more features.
Image Sharing Sites: Unsplash
Unsplash is the best free image-sharing platform. You could refer to it as one of the few open sources, loyalty-free sources of stock images.
Almost every blogger uses Unsplash for high-quality images without any watermark.
The only condition is that you must credit the uploader.
If you ask me, with Unsplash, you will never find the need to get a premium stock image. There are images for everything from tech to lifestyle and everything in-between.
The signup process is completely free and you don’t have to pay to download it. You can also retrieve images dynamically using a fancy URL.
Image Sharing Sites: Exposure
Exposure. co is a premium image-sharing web app that lets you upload an unlimited number of images without any bandwidth cap.
It can be classified as the “Medium” of the photography world.
You tell stories using photographs and your readers can follow the stories and subscribe for free.
There are many different gallery grids that you can use to create stunning web layouts.
iCloud Photos
iCloud Photos is only available for Apple users. With each Apple account, you get a free iCloud account. If you don’t have an Apple device, you won’t find iCloud Photos all that useful.
Image Sharing Sites: PostImage
PostImage is a simple image-sharing platform. Right off the bat, you can upload an image using upload, URL, or Windows desktop application.
It is also a free platform which makes it the best one for beginners and someone who just wants to test this platform.
No image-sharing sites list is complete without Instagram. It doesn’t matter if you don’t consider Instagram an “Image sharing platform”.
Millions of people from all over the world upload, share, like, and engage on this image-sharing social media platform.
The only problem here is that you can’t just download images and use them on your projects. There are no premium options that will let you do so either.
Image Sharing Sites: Facebook
Facebook is a closed-circuit social media network that lets you upload high-quality images and videos to your profile.
Recently, Facebook has also started paying people for video views which makes it a good platform to start posting videos online and make money on the side.
PhotoBlog
As the name suggests, PhotoBlog is a platform for photo-blogging and get the attention of your audience. Instead of using text to communicate, you use images and the stories behind the photos to tell your story.
You get a generic profile page that shares a little information about your blog’s metrics such as followers, curated content, and popular content.
On each image, there’s a dropdown menu that shares all the technical information about the same such as the Name of the camera, Focal Length, ISO, shutter speed, and more.
Image Sharing Sites: Imgur
We had a lot of premium and curated image sharing platforms. Now comes the most popular image-sharing portal on the internet, IMGUR.
You can sign up for free and don’t have to pay for the uploads and bandwidth. In some cases, you can even make money with Imgur.
If you want an ad-free experience, you can upgrade to Emerald. This upgrade also unlocks a lot more features such as fancy badges and icons on your profile.
Image Sharing Sites: Cluster
What if you don’t want to just store images or share images with the world? How do you go about keeping your images and multimedia files private?
Cluster is here to save you from all those questions.
This wonderful platform is for groups. You sign up and upload images, your friends and people in that particular image react, comment, and share it.
The best part is that you can download Android and iOS applications or use it on the web with your browser.
Your images are safe on this platform and nobody from outside of your group can retrieve the images without your permission.
Image Sharing Sites: Photobucket
Photobucket is a premium image sharing, organizing, and managing tool for personal and business usage.
If it has a free plan, you could have taken it out for a test drive but the premium plan itself is pretty inexpensive.
You don’t have to worry about manually renewing your subscription as it gets automatically renewed.
The base plan comes with 25 GB storage and state-of-the-art backup options.
ImageShack
ImageShack is an image hosting platform with features such as a free account with just a 10GB/Month quota, watermarking, direct linking, image stats, and automatic backup.
You can upgrade for more features such as dedicated support and so on.
The basic premium plan is inexpensive coming at just $3.99/Month.
Shutterfly
Shutterfly is completely different from all these image sharing sites.
It’s more inclined towards the business side of art. You upload images and sell printable such as coffee mugs, fridge magnets, notebooks, pillows, and more.
You can sign up for free and upload your art or purchase one that you love.
Image Sharing Sites: DeviantArt
DeviantArt is the largest talent-sharing platform online. You can your images, artwork, web design project, animated GIFs, and the list goes on.
It’s not a private image sharing platform but you can use this to showcase your skills. If you already have a website and are making money with affiliate marketing and AdSense, you use DeviantArt to showcase your art without using bandwidth of your server.
You can treat it as a talent-sharing social media platform.
It comes with a free plan that’s more than enough for most people.
OneDrive
OneDrive is Microsoft’s cloud-based storage platform. The free option comes with 5 GB of free storage space and you can easily upgrade to a OneDrive Standalone package which will give you 100GB of storage space.
In case, if you end up needing more than 100GB, you can easily upgrade to a combo package, “Microsoft 365 Personal” and add up to 1000 GB of storage.
All storage plan with Microsoft 365 comes with all Microsoft App including Outlook Premium, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
The office is used by all major corporations. So, getting a premium subscription will help you in using all-new tools and the extra 1 TB worth of storage.
Pixabay
Pixabay is similar to Unsplash. It offers all the features and has hundreds of thousands of high-quality stock images that you can download and use for free.
Conclusion: Top Image Sharing Sites
In this article, I have shared with you my favorite image sharing sites.
You can download stock images for free, treat some platforms as your off-site photo storing platform, and/or create a photography portfolio.
Having such options will help you kickstart your photography career without spending money on a premium web hosting company and WordPress development.