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Image Hosting Services

Do you have an ecommerce business? Do you sell items on an auction sites like Ebay? Do use images to sell products? Are you blogging or posting on forums? Do you have your own website? Do you have large files of images on your computer taking up valuable disk space? As a result of these large files, is your computer running slower? Is it cumbersome and difficult to upload images to your ecommerce site, Ebay, or to your blog? Have you wondered what would happen to your images if your computer crashed, or if it were stolen? More importantly is the time spent messing with a slow computer and unwieldy files costing your business money? If the answer is yes to any of these questions, then the solution for you is an image hosting website. They are also called auction image hosting services.

Image hosting services are websites that store your pictures. You take the pictures; load them onto your computer, and upload them to the image hosting website. It’s that easy. Your images are then safely and securely held for you on the site’s dedicated server. Once your pictures are hosted, you can easily upload or link images to other websites such as Ebay or other auction sites, forums, blogs, etc. This is not the only benefit and service image hosting companies offer.

Manage and Organize Images
With a click or two, image hosting services make it easy for you to manage and organize pictures with unique folders that you create and name. This makes it easy to transfer images to other websites such as Ebay, forums, blogs, Facebook, or MySpace. Additionally, you decide how the pictures will be presented. This is especially important if are selling items on auction sites because it gives you control on what order best displays your items.

Enhance and Edit Images
Editing tools on image hosting websites give you options to modify your pictures. With a few clicks, you can lighten, darken, crop, rotate, enlarge, shrink, and make thumbnail size pictures.

More Images on the Auction Site
To market your merchandise effectively on Ebay or other auction websites, your customers need to see several pictures of the item. Ebay allows you to post only one picture for free. Every picture after that is .15 unless you buy a package. However, with an image hosting service you can display as many pictures as needed to advertise your product.

Scrolling Gallery
Image hosting services allow you to create scrolling galleries that displays other items you have for listed on Ebay or other auction websites. The gallery appears when a customer clicks on one of your items. In addition, the galleries are customable; you can choose what merchandise to feature and in what order they are shown.

Free Image Hosting
Ebay’s Picture Manager is $9.99 a month to host your images. This is in addition to the normal fees Ebay and other auction websites charge; fees that add up and cut into your profits. Why cut into your profits for something that you can get for free?

Upload Groups of Pictures
One of the ways to transfer your images is to upload them from the image hosting site. You chose the pictures, the destination and click on upload. And instead of loading one picture at a time you, can upload multiple pictures at one time to Ebay and other auction marketplaces, or other websites.

Easy Link or Direct Link Images to Other Websites
Image hosting services make it easy to embed images onto your auction page by using a copy and paste approach called linking. The image hosting service provides the HTML code (images transferred with HTML coding have a better quality) to link your content to any website or auction site. You select the image to be transferred and click on the code that matches image’s destination (Ebay, ecommerce website, forum, blogs, emails, etc.). Next you copy the code and image then paste it on the destination website. If you are transferring the images to Ebay you would copy it in the “Item Description Box.” The images still stay on the hosting site, but appear on the selected website. The image hosting companies give detailed instructions for linking images.

Prevent Image and Bandwidth Stealing
When an image is copied without permission to another website it’s called hotlinking, bandwidth stealing, or leeching. Besides copyright issues; hotlinking can cost a business money. Bandwidth is the amount of data or information that is transferred from a website to a user’s computer. Every time a customer visits a website it costs the website in the terms of bandwidth. Website hosts (i.e. GoDaddy) and image hosting services give each customer a certain amount of bandwidth measured in megabytes. If you go over the allotted amount of bandwidth, the hosting company charges you an extra fee, or they will shut down your website. If you store your own images on your website and someone leeches them; it’s costing you bandwidth each time a computer user goes to the leecher’s web page. Stealing images is as easy as copying and pasting. Most image hosting services use URL filters to prevent unauthorized hotlinking and image stealing. They also have features that allow you to print on your images making them less attractive for hotlinking.

Image Plugins
Plugins are image enhancing, editing and uploading features especially used by bloggers and usable from their blogging page. Many image hosting services support plug-in applications. With a click of a button on a service panel, you can easily use these features to manipulate and transfer your images. With plugins you can resize, enhance, rotate, crop, frame, brand, and arrange your images to your specifications in sets or photo albums. Plugins are popular with the Wordpress blogging site.

Using Image Hosting Features for Name Branding
When you have an ecommerce or online auction business, it is important to get your name branded into the minds of your buyers. Image hosting services give you the tools to imprint images on products that you can use as promotional tools. Calendars, postage stamps, business cards, notepads, and postcards are just a few of the promotional products you can imprint with an image that represents your online auction or ecommerce business.

Conclusion
Image hosting services and/or auction image hosting websites take all the responsibility of storing, uploading, protecting and transferring images from you. Time is money when you have an ecommerce, auction, or Ebay business; image hosting sites free-up the time it takes to edit, enhance, and transfer images, allowing you to focus on other business matters. Additionally, they give you the tools to create the images that best represent your merchandise and ideas, and to top it off you can get image hosting for free. Now for the last question, why wouldn’t you subscribe to a free image hosting service?