So you took this great photograph and you want to share it with the world. You can certainly share using Shutterbug, Flickr, or one of many other photo sharing sites and Imgur is a photo sharing site. However, “Imgur makes sharing images with the Internet even easier. It can be used to share pictures with friends, as well as post images on message boards and blogs. You can manipulate the image a number of ways (editing was very limited) and automatically submit it to popular sites such as reddit or digg. You can also view popular user-submitted images in the gallery. Best of all, Imgur is completely free and you can submit an unlimited number of photographs.” When I uploaded an image I was presented with my image showing on a screen similar to the one below…

From the image screen I can….

• send a link to the image via Reddit, Digg, Fark, or Twitter
• email or IM a direct link to the image using the code provided by Imgur
• embed an image in a blog or webpage using the code provided by Imgur
• embed or post a link to an image on a message board using the code provided by Imgur

Here is a sample of a small thumbnail (using code provided by Imgur)…

http://imgur.com/uPMCo.jpg

Things I liked about Imgur…

• browse and click uploads
• instant small and large thumbnail access
• coding for embedding on a number of sites or blogs is automatic
• no registration is required to use the site
• you can upload a number of different files types: JPEG, GIF, PNG, APNG, TIFF, BMP, PDF, XFC (GIMP). Please note that the TIFF, BMP, PDF and XFC formats will be converted to PNG on upload.

While Imgur is an excellent and interesting photo-sharing site, I do wish that…

• photographs and images were not anonymous…the anonymity of of the site could be used for bullying purposes (in fairness…you can request that photo/images be deleted using a form…so if you were the victim chances are you could have the image removed eventually)
• images could be uploaded more than one at a time (bulk uploads)
• images were not automatically deleted after three months (unless they are viewed on a regular basis)
• deleting an image was not dependent on a one-time only code (if you don’t record the deletion code that appears when you first upload an image, deleting an image is almost impossible)
• thumbnail images linked to the original image

All things considered, I can see this tool could be very useful if you wanted to share an image on twitter or wanted to send/share a photo or image with another individual, but I don’t think it can replace storage sites like Flickr or Photobucket.