Free image hosts that allow direct links?

[Parker]

I recently found out that Photobucket has changed their Terms of Use and no longer allows hotlinking for their free accounts. One day I went to see one of my posts and all my images where replaced by a nasty message saying that I had reached the limit and needed to upgrade my account From their Terms of service page:

The free account does not allow any image linking or 3rd party image hosting.

Thing is, I've been using Photobucket for pretty much twelve years now and I don't know of any other free image hosting service that allows direct links to images. I know of Imgur and Imageshack, but I'm not sure if they allow you to paste image codes to forums. I've never used them. I'm not too concerned with finished artwork, since I have DA for that, and it's allowed me to direct link pretty much everything I wanted, but for WIPs I'm currently using my stash, and I don't want to cram it with several images or have to remove them from time to time. Besides, there's nothing I hate more than opening a thread in Rehearsals and seeing all images are broken.

I've searched the forum and found a similar thread, but it's from 2013, and maybe some of the alternatives have also changed their terms since then. So, any free hosts you use and like that allow hotlinking?

[MelianAlcarime]

I use PostImg. It's designed for that purpose, signing up is totally free, they have albums, no ads, and they'll even automatically resize your images for you if you want. They may be adding premium accounts at some point in the near future, which will require image optimization for free users (potentially bad for pixel art), but that's not underway at this time.

[Parker]

Thank you! This is exactly what I needed

[MelianAlcarime]

You're very welcome!

[Gwen]

Pretty sure Imgur allows it as well, it's what I started using. Photobucket sucks nowadays

[MelianAlcarime]

It's sad, really. When I first got into dolling, Photobucket was the bomb. Imgur is pretty decent; the only reason I prefer PostImg is because it allows me to organize into albums. Well, that and I was unsure whether my images on Imgur were private or not. I like to have a little control over where my images are (old habits die hard).

[Phoenigette]

Does PostImg have a privacy setting? I'm pretty sensitive to this because technically bases count as nudity. I've been reported on photobucket before when i hadn't turned on privacy.

Also, does imgur have a privacy setting?

[Consonanta]

Imgur does have a privacy setting; one can set the status of uploaded images to Hidden, which makes images accessible through link only and prevents them from being automatically submitted to the gallery. I would recommend enforcing this setting at all times, as the Imgur community can be quite churlish with their comments.

[MelianAlcarime]

PostImg images are private by default, since it's designed for this purpose rather than as a photo community. They are only seen if someone links to them. However, when you upload images, there's a little radio button for "Does this image contain mature content?"

[Blu]

Kind of late to the topic, but what does it mean if you say it does contain mature content? And is that for imjur or postimg?

I jumped ship on photobucket years ago when it scrambled all of my .gif pictures. >_< Ruined dozens of dolls and bases... It only got worse from there, seems a bit better nowadays, but then nothing is working for free accounts anymore, so... -_-