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ImageShack, a photo sharing site used by people to host their images to be displayed on their social networking profile pages has added video uploading and sharing capability

ImageShack is claiming that their video hosting feature is more advanced than the ones offered by Youtube, Revver and others, since ImageShack will pre-process your video on your system instead of first uploading it to their servers and then processing it their. The pre-processing involved file compression which could reduce a file by nearly five times its original size making the file uploads a much quicker and less bandwidth consuming task.

Users can also add tags to their videos and can make them private or public. Like the photos, the videos also come with website sharing code to embed them on other sites and blogs.

We tested many photo hosting sites including Flickr, Photobucket, Slide, and ImageShack to decide upon using a service to host images used in different reviews at Startup Meme. Flickr and Photobucket which were much better and more community oriented sites got cut out because they were offering free versions with a lot of hassles. Where as Slide included watermarks in your photos, so we decided to host our photos on ImageShack even though it lacks on usability grounds and sometimes distracts me into “Tickling the Fat Kid till he Barfs” and (They still have web 1.0 style ads asking you to “punch the monkey” or “kick Paris Hilton” to generate clicks)

The one thing I am unable to comprehend is that if Youtube, Revver, Metacafe and other video sharing sites could afford to offer free video sharing facility to users, why can’t Flickr and Photobucket offer free photo-sharing and hosting service, something that costs much less storage and bandwidth. It is only a matter of time when these services either get free of charge or gets squashed by a service that is totally free.

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