Skip to main content.
July 19th, 2006

Image Hosting - A Good Alternative to Image Shack

From my research I’ve found TinyPic to be the best option. It offers unlimited image hosting, generates some standard HTML to paste where-ever you need to, and its ads seem very tolerable.

Background:

Imageshack and similiar image hosting services are very useful. Not only can you quickly upload images you want to share at no expense to yourself, but it then generates all kinds of useful HTML and link structures for you to paste including an automatically generated thumbnail.
imageshack.png
See look how easy, I can post a link in a forum, email, etc!
This is a huge time-saver.

However ImageShak and a few other services I tried are just over-run with ads. If I recall even the thumbnails they generated had ads. And their generated links linked back to their page holding my image, not just the image. So you’d end up on a page with 90% ads and 10% my image. I was embarresed to use that thing!

So I set off to find an alternative. So far TinyPic seems to be the best option. It’s not as feature-rich as ImageShack but I’m not ashamed to use it in forums ;-)

Resources:

  1. This page has an excellent run down of free image hosting services i.e. no registration required. It even lists their storage and time limits.
  2. A Del.icio.us Tag Listing is also useful to would-be researchers in this department.

Posted by Greg Pinero (Primary Searcher) as flickr, Other at 11:44 AM MST

2 Comments »

December 28th, 2005

flickr API - How to get URL of a photo

This task is not at all obvious from the documentation. However this documentation page will get you started.

As an example, here’s a Python function I wrote that works with the Photo object returned by flickr.py (a nice flickr API library for Python):

def getPhotoURL(photo,size='o'):
    """
    Create Photo URL as:
    http://static.flickr.com/{server-id}/{id}_{secret}_[mstb].jpg
    Size Suffixes
    The letter suffixes are as follows:
    s   small square 75x75
    t   thumbnail, 100 on longest side
    m   small, 240 on longest side
    -   medium, 500 on longest side
    b   large, 1024 on longest side (only exists for very large original images)
    o   original image, either a jpg, gif or png, depending on source format
    """
    return r"""http://static.flickr.com/%s/%s_%s_%s.jpg""" % (str(photo.server),str(photo.id),str(photo.secret),size)

Thanks to J Wynia for the help.

Posted by Greg Pinero (Primary Searcher) as Python, flickr at 7:49 AM MST

Comments Off