Best Free Image and Video Media Hosting

Media such as images and videos are always present on a website. Large websites usually separate their media from their main website. For example, Facebook stores all its media on Akamai, and Forbes hosts its media separately on thumbor.forbes.com.

Advantages

Why do they have to separate image hosting from their main hosting? Isn’t it easier to just store them together with the main hosting? Let’s discuss this according to my opinion and some references.

Easy to Manage

With media hosting, you can easily manage the images and videos you store, considering the tools used by that hosting.

Lightens the Server

Perhaps this is the reason why large websites consider separating their media hosting from their main hosting.

Imagine millions of people accessing a website simultaneously and regularly, and some of them accessing images and videos. It is certain that the bandwidth used will also be larger than usual, and it is likely to burden the server because it works many times harder than it should, and eventually the server goes down and the website cannot be accessed.

With a separate media server, the main server will be lighter, and of course, it will also affect rendering speed.

Media Optimization

To display responsive images, you need various sizes for one image. With media optimization features, you don’t need to upload images in various sizes. Just upload one large image, and the server will do the rest, and finally, images of various sizes can be directly applied to responsive images.

List of Media Hosting

Here are some of the best free video and image media hosting services you can use:

Cloudinary

Cloudinary is a cloud service that provides image and video storage. For a free account, you will be given 25 GB of storage, 25 GB/month of bandwidth, and 25K image or video transformations. Cloudinary is also used by large companies like SONY and NBC. It also comes with various features, including:

• Upload widget, API, and search
• Remote fetch, auto-backup, and revision tracking
• Image and video transformations
• Video transcoding and adaptive streaming
• High performance delivery through a CDN
• Support — forums, tickets, and email
• Access to free add-ons

Sign up for Cloudinary

Amazon S3

Amazon S3, or Amazon Simple Storage Service, is a free cloud storage service with 5 GB of storage and 20K requests, as well as 99.999999999% data scalability and durability. Nasdaq, the world’s first electronic stock exchange, also uses Amazon S3. Many features are offered by Amazon S3. See more details on the Amazon S3 Features page.

Amazon S3

Filestack

Filestack is not much different from Cloudinary. Filestack provides free services with 500 MB of storage and a maximum upload of 10 MB, 1K transformations/month, and 1 GB/month of bandwidth. Here are some features for free accounts:

• Web SDK
• Web-based file picker
• Mobile SDK
• 20+ Cloud integrations
• Upload any file type
• Image transformations
• Document conversions
• Responsive images
• Integrated CDN
• Resumable uploads (manual)
• Workflows
• Transformation UI

Go to Filestack

ImageKit

ImageKit also provides free cloud image and video media services with 20 GB of storage and bandwidth/month. Unlike Cloudinary, ImageKit allows you to store unlimited images. Here are some features available for free accounts. ImageKit is also used by large companies like SONY and Traveloka.

Here are some features available for free accounts:

• Integrated Global CDN
• Access to ImageKit’s global processing network
• HTTPS and HTTP/2 support
• Automatic image optimization
• Multiple image transformations
• Smart crop and face crop
• Named and Chained transformations
• Integration with AWS S3
• Integration with Magento, Shopify, Wordpress or any HTTP server
• Media Library with search
• Image Upload and Management APIs
• Cache Purge UI and APIs
• Usage analytics
• Delivery of non-image files
• Support Methods

Sign up for ImageKit

Cloudimage

Similar to Cloudinary, Cloudimage also provides free image media storage with 25 GB Cache and 25 GB traffic/month. Unlike Cloudinary, Cloudimage allows you to store unlimited images.

Here are some features for free accounts:

• Unlimited images and all image transformations
• Delivery aliases
• Origin URLs whitelisting
• Watermarking
• CDN invalidation
• Image and video compression
• Modern image formats (WebP, JPEG, AV1 available soon)
• Dashboards and reporting
• CMS plugins (Wordpress, Magento, WooCommerce, Prestashop)
• Responsive images plugin
• Standard technical support

Sign up for Cloudimage

Google

Did you know that Google products can be used as storage for media such as images and videos? Yes, these products are Blogger, Google Photos, and Google Drive. These three products have interconnected storage, so the storage size of these three products is 15GB and includes other Google products such as Gmail.

Although it can be used as storage, you will find it a bit difficult if you want to use it on a website, because there is no documentation regarding image transformations provided. If used in Blogger, it will be easy.

Uploadcare

Like other services, Uploadcare also offers their services for free, but unfortunately, the storage is only 100 MB and 1 GB bandwidth/month. But who would have thought that large companies like Mozilla, Webflow, Stackshare, and L’oreal use Uploadcare services for their products.

Sign up for Uploadcare

Sirv

Sirv provides free storage of 500 MB and 2 GB/month bandwidth.

Sign up for Sirv

Gumlet

Gumlet offers their storage services with 1GB/month bandwidth. I’m not sure how much storage can be accommodated because it’s not listed on their pricing page.

Some features for free accounts:

• Unlimited image optimizations
• Unlimited master / source images
• No limit on cache storage
• Detailed usage analytics

Sign up for Gumlet

Final Words

So which one will you choose? I would choose Cloudinary and ImageKit. If you are a developer, you should use Cloudinary because Cloudinary is already integrated with many popular products and has large storage.