What is the best free hosting service?

[Brucie Kibbutz]

:shrug:

Also, do the free services tend to degrade the image quality at all?

[ManiacJoe]

1. What features are you looking for?

For example, flickr tends to focus on the community/commenting aspects while Smugmug (not free) focuses more on presentation.

[Brucie Kibbutz]

2. I am mainly concerned

with image quality. Sometimes after I upload to Photobucket, it looks like the image quality has degraded a bit. It doesn't seem as bad if I don't use the bulk uploader though. If I do it more than one at a time, I can definitely see jaggies that weren't there before.

[dbmk]

3. Depends on what kind of hosting.

If you are talking a web hotel or the likes, where you upload files and maintain the webpages yourself, then you are in full control of the quality.

The image specific "upload" sites all have some resizing going on in their basic packages I think.

Fx: Unless you have a pro account - which is not that costly really - Flick resizes to 1024 on the longest side if the original is bigger than that, and I would not trust their jpg resizing routine to be the best.

[Brucie Kibbutz]

4. just looking for hosting, I guess

The two options I could use for posting Photobucket pics on most forums are 800 X 600 and 1024 X 768.

My camera does 640 X 480, which is smaller than I would like. The next option on my camera is 1600 X 1200, which is a bit big for posting on some forums that only allow up to 800 X 600 maximum. Should I shoot using 1600 X 1200 and just let Photobucket downsize it to 800 X 600? Do you think that degrades the image quality?

[dbmk]

5. I would shoot at 1600x1200

And then resize them myself (don't know what tools you have for that).
Don't know if photobucket will still resize to save space, but resizing them yourself would probably be the best way to ensure the quality you would like.

[ManiacJoe]

6. Doing your own resizing is the better option.

Not only do you get to preview the quality, but you usually need to do a little sharpening after the resize, too.