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My company uses flickr and picasa web albums as poor man's content delivery networks (CDN) for image hosting, but I'm curious if anyone has any recommendations on any other services that might be worth looking into, paid and free?

Preferably something that has an API so that it can be integrated discreetly on the backend as a WordPress plugin or for other development frameworks.

A CDN such as Amazon is cheap, and it works, but the lack of a photo-centric API is what prevents me from using it for general usage.

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can you please explain what you mean by 'photo-centric API' ... ?? –  Pure.Krome Sep 2 '10 at 0:41
Is the Flickr API not sufficient? flickr.com/services/api –  James Lawruk Sep 2 '10 at 16:04
Flickr's API is good, I use it now, but I'm looking for something with more controls over things like sizing and compression, etc. Additionally, when I check the speed of my sites, the images from Flickr are consistently the slowest things on the site. Picasa isn't bad for speed, but I hate everything else about it :p –  Dan Gayle Sep 2 '10 at 16:31

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up vote 6 down vote accepted

Stack Overflow (and thus by definition, this site) use http://imgur.com/ as they've just launched a brand new API. I'm not familiar with it as I haven't used it, but I had a discussion with Womble (the developer who designed it) about it and it seemed pretty neat.

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The big downside with imgur.com is that currently for commercial sides they only want to get involved with larger higher trafficked sites on a per case basis. I hope they go get additional investments and make it more widely available. –  citadelgrad Sep 3 '10 at 15:27
1- "To use Imgur's API commercially, you must first register your application. Once that's done, you must register with Mashape. Mashape allows you to choose a pricing plan that fits your needs. From then on, the API endpoint is imgur-apiv3.p.mashape.com which must be used in replace of api.imgur.com/"; what's the meaning of this. Do we have to pay extra money for mashape to use their api? 2- Can we use their service with our domain name (like i.mydomain.com)? –  ozz May 17 '14 at 3:05

You can use vaious free CDNs like photobucket, flickr etc and can compress the images locally using a PHP scripts like timthumb.

Is there any special need for APIs?

If you feel that these scripts are eating bandwidth then you can search some free webhost provider which can host and run your own script from another server.

I like Google because of its DNS resolving time, but it doesn't let me run my script :-(

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