www.imagevenue.com

Image Venue: Just the right venue to upload images!

Imagevenue.com, a free image hosting solution, allows you to share digital pictures with friends, post images on blogs, bulletin boards, and message boards. The site also allows you to hotlink images from your personal website, web log or eBay auctions. The service offered is completely free. The revenue generated by placing text links of featured advertisers fuels the site.

The site lacks a professional layout and design. There are no images or graphics in the site other than a thumbnail image on the top left hand corner of the page. The domain name is given lesser importance in the site, making the new users to check the explorer address bar to know where they are! White space dominates the homepage and inner pages. The site indeed promises big fun for eBay sellers, message board users and bloggers, but the poor layout and design fails to convey the message.

An image uploading machine dominates the landing page of the site. This engine allows you to upload images from your hard drive. Once you are done with attaching and uploading of files, the engine retrieves links of hotlink clickable thumbnails, which you can use in forums or message boards. Make sure that you save these links, because if you happen to lose the path of an image, you will have to upload it again. However, you can keep track of your uploaded images by registering as a member.

There are two types of memberships - free and premium. By becoming a free member you can keep track of all the images you upload, but this accompanies advertisement links on image landing pages. A free image tracking account is a must to monitor your images. By the way, creating a free account won't eat much of your time. Just supply your username and email address, and you will be provided with a password to your account. No email verification is involved. As a premium member you can enjoy 1000 MB of disk space on the Pentium 4 Linux Server apart from 30 GB of bandwidth transfer per month and ad-free image landing pages. Hotlinking protection, full FTP access to your account, and 24x7 network monitoring are other benefits of getting a premium membership.

The FAQ section of the site is not an elaborate one, however it is detailed enough to educate a new user about the functionalities of the site.

Lubuna K A

Hi-Tech Editorial Division