The policy changed to whom images are displayed on third party websites. Users from the US and Europe were able to see ImageShack images that were embedded on third party websites.

Users from other countries however could not see the ImageShack images anymore on those website. They would see a dummy image instead that informed them about the change with the sentence: “your country can only view this image by logging into ImageShack”. To make matters worse, some webmasters noticed that the images they had embedded on their websites were replaced as well with another dummy stating “Unregistered domain. Go to http://imageshack.us to register”. And this change affected users from all countries.

These are two related issues. It appears that ImageShack is checking the IP address of every user who is requesting an image that is hosted on their site. If the IP lookup reveals that the user is not coming from a country in the whitelist, the dummy image with the log in to view the image is displayed.

Webmasters who have been using ImageShack to directly embed images on their websites that they have uploaded to the image hosting site will see a slightly different version of the frog in ice.

This basically means that ImageShack performs two checks: They check the user’s IP to see if the country is in the whitelist, and they check if the website the image is embedded on is registered.

What ImageShack Wants You To Do

ImageShack displays solutions to resolve both situations on the dummy images. Users from blacklisted countries need to register, log in and stay logged in to view images on third party websites.

Webmasters are asked to register their domain so that the replacement image is removed and the “real” images are shown on the website again. The Imageshack homepage does not link directly to the domain registration form, nor does it reveal any information about the process. The Faq and Blog do not reveal information either.

Webmasters need to visit this page to register their domains with ImageShack.

Regular users need to visit the ImageShack sign up page instead to register an account with the image hosting site.

What You Could do Instead

Webmasters have only two choices. They can register their domain name, which they should do anyway to display the images again on their website. They then have the option to use another image hosting service for future images, preferably one that is more reliable and communicative when it comes to changes that impact embedding images on third party websites.

Another option would be to move the ImageShack images to another hosting service. This option may not be practical depending on the amount of images and pages of the website. A user with 100 pages and 10 images on each would have to upload 1000 images and change the embed code on all images.

A viable hosting alternative that webmasters may want to take a look at is the image hosting service TinyPic.

Regular Internet users from blocked countries can alternatively use a web proxy, virtual private network or other tool to hide their original country so that they can view the embedded Imageshack images directly without having to register and stay logged in. Check out or web proxy listing for a start.

Possible Motives For The Change

Why did ImageShack make the change? (Please note that this is all theory, the company has not made an official statement as far as I know)

Bandwidth could be a core reason, or more precisely the bandwidth to ad revenue ratio. Ad revenue is highest for users from the US, Canada, UK, Europe (west) and some other countries. Maybe they have found out that it is not cost-effective to display images to users from other countries. Many factors do play a role here though that they would have to add to the calculation. Just look at the bandwidth consumption vs. the ad revenue would not be enough. Indirect factors, e.g. how many visitors from whitelisted countries view images on unregistered domains or the mouth to mouth advertising come to mind.

It could also be that ImageShack tries to grow their registered user base and domains that they serve, for instance to show growth and make the company more attractive to potential advertisers and buyers.

But this is all speculation on my part. The fact that stands is that ImageShack has made a change to their site that affects many users and webmasters. To make things worse, the company failed to communicate that change to their user base.

Then again, it is their good right to make changes to their service, even if it alienates a large part of their user base.

Have you been affected by the change? What were your consequences?

Developers have found ways to reduce the number of those elements on the image hosting sites. Add-ons like Adblock Plus or NoScript reduce the clutter on those websites so that it is easier to access the images on those websites.

Show Just Image is a userscript that supports almost 100 different image hosts among them popular sites like Flickr, Fapomatic and Photobucket.

The script redirects image requests on supported image hosting sites from their standard pages to the actual address of the image so that the image gets loaded in the web browser without the surrounding page.

Flickr images will for instance be automatically displayed in their largest size in the web browser. The script seems to handle image requests on all supported image hosts the same way.

The script redirects the initial request from the original page after it has been loaded so that the full size image is loaded and displayed in the web browser.

The script is fully compatible with the Firefox web browser. The Greasemonkey add-on needs to be installed. It might also be compatible with other web browsers but this has not been tested.

The Flickr Search results now display a small bar above the actual photos that have been found that can be used to change the view of the photos from the default small view to medium, detail or slideshow. Sorting can also be changed from relevant to either recent or interesting.

Small and medium photo search results display a small i icon in the lower right corner when hovering the mouse over them. A click on the icon will open a detailed view of the photo in the foreground. Another click on the photo will close that foreground image.

A right sidebar on the search results page is now showing groups, photographers, tags and locations that are closely related to the search term. Those items can be used to explore related photos, photographers, groups and locations.

Some searches do now include information on top based on the search parameters of the user. It is for example displaying if the search was only performed in the Creative Commons section and dates if a date filter has been set.

[source Flickr Blog]

Bilder Herunterlader is such a tool. The name is German and stands for Image Downloader (don’t worry, the interface is available in English and German). The tool is a Java application which means that it can be run not only on Windows computers but also on those running Linux. A Firefox extension is available to make it even more comfortable for Firefox users.

About 70 image hosts are already configured in the image downloader which comes with the options to configure additional hosts. The best case scenario is that you right-click a page full of thumbnails and select the Load Images With BH option in Firefox. A download selection window will pop up which can be used to deselect images that should not be downloaded and to pick the right folder for the images.

Everything has been designed to be as easy as possible. It takes just one click to add all images to the download queue of the application. Image names can be recognized automatically as well.

Not all image hosting sites are supported in the default installation and some are not configured to download the original images right away when right-clicking a page full of thumbnails. This can be added for most image hosting sites in the program’s options. It is furthermore possible to edit existing rules so that the links to the full sized images are recognized by the software application.

The best way to get an understanding of rule creation is to read the tutorial on the developers homepage and to look at a few existing rules.

There are two possible scenarios:

• It is possible to discover the url of the full sized image from the thumbnail url
• The url to the full image can be discovered by parsing the html source code

Both methods make use of regular expressions and it might be good to read up on regular expressions first to have a firm understanding of the concept.

Bilder Herunterlader provides sophisticated and advanced means to download images from image hosting sites. It should work on most image hosting sites and can be really helpful if you regularly download images from image hosts.

The process obviously requires authentication and that’s the first step in the process. After picking one of the available image hosting sites the user has to enter his login credentials to for authentication purposes.

Once the credentials have been supplied Migratr begins to download all photos from the selected image host to the local computer. Another authentication is required to be able to export the photos again to the new image hosting site.

And thus the authentication process begins anew. After that it’s just a matter of selecting the folder where the photos have been saved into and hitting the Start Export button. The software works pretty well and I did not experience any problems while using it.

It provides a nice way to backup your photos from those image hosting sites if you just complete the first three steps of the procedure.

Migratr requires the Windows .net framework 3.5 and should be running on pretty much every Windows NT compatible operating system. Tried and tested on Windows XP where it worked fine.

Well, all that is about to change. Digital Inspiration has come up with a way to embed or hide an mp3 file within a jpeg image uploaded to these photo-hosting sites. The process is quite simple and only requires a little bit of command-line work.

Firstly, copy your mp3 file and an image file to one folder. Next up, switch to the command-line interface. You can do this by going to Start > Run > Cmd. From here, navigate to the folder where the song and image are saved. Then, type in the following command:

‘copy /b mypicture.jpg + mysong.mp3 mynewpicture.jpg’

Replace ‘mypicture’ and ‘mysong’ with the actual file names. The resultant image ‘mynewpicture’ will contain your mp3 file in image format and can be uploaded directly to Flickr. When you want to save this song to your computer, open up the page containing the image, select ‘All sizes’ and download the original image size. Change the extension of the file to mp3 and you are good to go.

While I’ve used an mp3 as an example of embedding a file within an image, you can pretty much use the same method for any type of file. However, remember that you cannot hide file size so if you upload images that are 5MB and 10MB big, Flickr is obviously going to get suspicious. What do you think of this trick? Are you concerned about the potential for abuse? Let me know in the comments.

Uncensored means that it is possible to upload all kinds of pictures as long as they are legal under Swedish law which is pretty much everything imaginable. The site is blazing fast, uses a slick ajaxified interface and tags to categorize images.

Even non registered users may upload images, add tags and a removal code which is the only way to delete the image once it has been uploaded.

About 140 file formats are allowed including rar and zip archives. If you upload more than one picture an album is automatically created and an additional address for the album will be given to the uploader.

It remains to be seen how fast it will be when thousands of users use the service but I’m very confident that it will still be one of the fastest image hosting services on the web. One thing that is missing though are private albums.