When I started writing this blog, I hosted the images in my posts on the same server that hosted the blog. A little later I started hosting the images off site in the name of increased load speed (load balancing across servers), keeping the bandwidth usage of my server down and to keep the images in a separate location in case I wanted to change my blog’s host (which I did: blogger -> wordpress -> my own host). I started using Photobucket simply because I had heard of it before and it seemed easy enough to use. Well, not too long after I moved all my images to Photobucket, I found a comparison of various image hosting sites. In the comparison, it showed that ImageShack had a higher bandwidth limit per image per hour. Since I’m a plan-for-the-future kinda guy, I thought I’d investigate ImageShack a little more. I signed up for an account and started using it for my next post. Half way through uploading my images, I just quit and went back to Photobucket. ImageShack just took too many clicks.

Here’s how I upload an image to Photobucket and get the URL:

1. Log in (if I’m not already):

2. The next page you come to both has a few edit fields to upload new images and also lists the last several images that you uploaded. From here, you can browse to or enter the local path of the image(s):

3. Now the image is uploaded and appears in the uploaded image list. You simply click (not double click, just single click) on the edit field containing the newly uploaded image’s URL and you’re done:

To accomplish the same thing with ImageShack, I do this:

1. Log in (if I’m not already):

2. Click on “Upload Image”:

3. A little popup dialog appears. From here, you can browse to or enter the local path of the image (only a single image can be uploaded from here):

4. After the image has been uploaded, it appears in the uploaded image list. From here, you need to right click on the image:

5a. If you click “View Image”, you’ll see a page showing the photo. You can then right click the image and copy the image’s location:

5b. If you click “Share It”, another popup dialog appears with various fields that you can then manually select the photo’s URL and then copy it:

Both websites have a multiple image upload, but since I rarely need to upload more than two or three images at a time I can just use the simple image upload. Either way, to just upload a single image is immensely easier and faster to do in Photobucket than in ImageShack. There may be a simpler path that I’m not aware of in ImageShack, but I haven’t found it. And even if that’s true, than that’s another strike against ImageShack; It would prove that it’s not easily discoverable either.

Sure Photobucket doesn’t have the prettiest or fanciest UI, but if we only look at pure ease of use and speed of uploading process, Photobucket wins hands down. If we don’t count login and if we use the mouse to do everything, Photobucket needs five mouse clicks to upload a single image. ImageShack requires eight mouse clicks (plus one to return to the main page, which Photobucket does not).

Flickr is another popular image hosting, but I encountered similar problems. It took nine clicks (plus one to return to the main page) and loaded numerous pages in the process. I know there are some tools to make it easier to do this, but I can’t see how any of these can beat Photobucket’s great ease of use and single page to do everything I need to do.

Yet another thing I love about Photobucket is the format of their URLs. Since I have an account there, I already know the format of the URL of each image I upload. It will be:

http://i183.photobucket.com/albums/x294/mike6024/<filename>

I can write up my post and fill in all of my img src’s before uploading any of the images. You can’t say the same about Flickr or ImageShack. So based on all that…

Why in the world shouldn’t you use Photobucket?