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?

Rehost Image is a simple but elegant solution for those users. The Firefox add-on adds an entry to the right-click context menu allowing the user to upload the image to a ftp server or the popular image hosting service Imagehost.

Imagehost is the default option configured in the add-on. The only other option is to add one or multiple ftp servers in the add-on settings.

FTP servers are added in the options. This requires adding the host and port, username, password, upload directory and http directory. Once done the new option becomes available as well.

Rehost Images offers several additional options including the ability to resize images automatically and to select the image format and quality.

Information about uploaded images are automatically copied to the clipboard. From there it is possible to access the image or link to it.

The history in the add-on options offers a list of previously uploaded images which is helpful if those information need to be accessed again (considering that the clipboard only contains one item at a time).

Rehost Image is a helpful Firefox add-on for users who regularly upload images posted on websites to image hosts or ftp servers.

The files of the torrent will then be downloaded to your Imageshack account and can be downloaded from there to a local computer. Free registered users have a monthly download and storage limit of 15 Gigabytes which should be sufficient for many users. Imageshack plans to provide premium accounts that allow users to download and store additional Gigabytes.

The service is – not surprisingly – experiencing some heavy usage which caught Imageshack by surprise. As a side note, are not those companies learning from the failures of other companies who got surprised in the past ? It’s happening all the time and one would think that once a company would be prepared if they announce a service that has everything it needs to become popular in no time.

Downloads seem to have been stopped at this point for new users until server capacities have been added. Now basically Imageshack provides users with a great way of downloading torrents. The service is especially useful for users with ISPs that use traffic shaping or other means of interfering with P2P downloads. It could also be a viable alternative for inexperienced users who just want to download this one file from Bittorrent without having to configure a software and probably their router.

Torrents stop seeding once they have been downloaded which is surely enough reason for some Bittorrent trackers to ban Imageshack completely. It would be great if they would offer some kind of virus scanner for finished torrents, maybe in cooperation with Virustotal to add safety to the download experience.

I personally think that this could be a great service for many users. Probably not for the hardcore Bittorrent users but for those with a few downloads each month and those that have troubles with their ISPs, countries or computers.

Moreover, if you don’t use a very unique username, most likely you’ll sooner or later find out that your username has already been taken by someone else on a particular website. That forces you to choose another one and remember it or write it down. A good solution for storing such username password combinations for various services is KeePass but it doesn’t resolve the problem of multiple logins. The solution to this might be OpenID.

You simply create your openID account at one of openID providers (e.g. myOpenID ) and after that you can sign in to all OpenID enabled sites without having to re-enter login details on all of them.

You just provide your unique ID (username.openidprovider.tld) and that’s it. It could be especially useful if you don’t have the possibility to use features such as Opera’s Wand. One disadvantage is that the website must support it. However, the number of OpenID enabled sites is growing quite fast. Some of them are:

• ImageShack
• Technorati
• Ma.gnolia
• Crunchy
• Rootly

Another disadvantage is that if someone steals your identity, he could gain access to all of your accounts on these websites. Does not make a difference for users who do use the same username and password on all sites though.