What’s the Fastest and Easiest Way to Share an Image Online?

Back in the day, you used to have to get an account with a service like PhotoBucket to upload images that you wanted to post on a forum or just quickly send to a friend, but these days it's a lot easier. There are a ton of services that let you just drag in a photo, paste a link, and have your photo available for anyone to see. Unfortunately, if you ask a dozen people what to use, and you'll get a dozen different answers.
It's not that there's no easy way to do it, but because there are tons of ways. Thankfully, it doesn't have to be difficult, and the best methods don't require much effort on your part. Let's look first at some of the simplest ways to get a picture off of your computer and onto the internet, and then we'll try our hand at your smartphone.

Desktop

Looking for a fast and easy way to get an image off of your desktop and onto the internet where everyone can see it? Try one of these drag-and-drop services:

• Dropbox: If you're already a Dropbox user (or use any other Dropbox alternative), the easiest method for you would be to drop that image into your Dropbox folder. After the image syncs with the cloud, you can right-click it to get a URL you can paste anywhere—forum posts, emails, support chats, wherever you need it to be.
• Minus: Minus started off as simple image sharing, but you can use it for much more than just image files. Drag and drop your image onto the page and Minus will upload the file and return a URL you can use to share it. That's all it takes. Minus operates a little like Dropbox, so if you want to sign up for an account, you get 50GB of storage for your files and images.
• Imgur: When we asked you what you favorite services for quick image sharing, you overwhelmingly voted for Imgur. You don't have to sign up for an account or anything—you can just select the image you want to share, upload it, and that's all. Best of all, you can link to the Imgur page if you have a gallery of images to share, or directly to the image file if you prefer.
• CloudApp/FluffyApp: CloudApp (Mac) and FluffyApp (Windows) both make it super-easy to share screenshots, not to mention other files. If screenshots are your most frequently posted files, they're a good bet, even though they need a little setup before you can start using them. You'll have to download the respective app and then sign up for an account, but once you're up and running, sharing with either tool is just as seamless as Dropbox.

If you share screenshots frequently, your best bet is to find a screenshot utility—like our favorites for Windows, for OS X, or for Linux—that integrates with the service you want to use. Almost all of these services have third-party apps that will take screen captures, upload them to the web for you, and even drop the link to the image in your clipboard. We should also note that if your goal is to share an image with a specific community—like your Facebook friends or Twitter followers—you should just upload your file to that service. If you're posting an image to a forum or customer service page that allows image uploads, just upload it directly. It's usually the fastest option.

Mobile

Sharing a photo or screenshot of your phone is a different—and slightly more complicated—matter. Unless you feel like making your computer an intermediary between an image you have on your phone and the place you need to share it on the web, try these services that make mobile image sharing easy:

• Dropbox: Dropbox works just as well on mobile devices as it does on the desktop. Again, you'll have to be a user and have the Dropbox app installed, uploading an image to Dropbox is easy in iOS and Android, and once the image is uploaded, getting a link to the file is just as easy.
• Minus: Minus users can use the service's iOS or Android apps to share images quickly from their mobile phones. If you're a minus user, your files go right into your account. If you're not, you can still use the apps to upload and share images with just a few taps.

With mobile image sharing, it's more likely that if you have an image or a photo to share, you want to post it somewhere your friends can see it, whether it's Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or somewhere else, so that's natually faster and easier than using one of these methods. If you're interested in a private photo sharing network, consider these great options for Android and for iOS.
The only downside to this is that uploading an image to a social network means you'll have to tweak your settings to make the image viewable to the world (if that's what you want), or available to anyone you pass the link along to. If you're looking to share a single link with anyone without worrying who'll be able to see it or not, these services are the best way to go.
Title image by Hasloo Group Production Studio (Shutterstock).
Reposted from LifeHacker.com