General Questions · What is Glowfoto™? · Who needs Glowfoto™? · What kinds of photos can I upload? · How big can my photos be? Do I need to resize them first? · How long will my images be available? · Can I create an account? Can I manage my uploads? · How do you make money? · I like/hate this! Who can I compliment/scold? · Uploading multiple files is so annoying. Surely there's a better way? · Hey, how come my animated gif isn't animated? · But I want to hotlink! Somesite.com lets me hotlink! · Who made this? · What about video? What is Glowfoto™? Glowfoto is a completely free way to host images for use on message boards, auction sites, social networking sites -- pretty much anywhere you need to host images. But Glowfoto is more than that. You can use Glowfoto to create photo albums and share them with friends. We are constantly adding new ways for you to share your images. Who needs Glowfoto™? Anyone who doesn't have their own website or webspace who needs to share photos on another site needs Glowfoto™. Typically, if you want to include an image with an auction listing, message board post, or other use, you would upload your photo (typically over ftp), figure out the URL to the image, create the HTML code or BBCode necessary to display the image on the site, and paste it in. If you don't have your own website, however, you need to host your images somewhere else. Enter Glowfoto™. But even if you have your own website, Glowfoto™ makes the process of sharing photos on other sites so simple, you might need it too. What kinds of photos can I upload? Pretty much anything that doesn't violate our Terms of Service. For example, upload family photos for sharing on message boards, event photos, personal photos for sharing on social networking sites, or photos of items you're selling on auction sites like eBay. How big can my photos be? Do I need to resize them first? You can upload photos of any size. Don't worry, if they are too big, they will be automatically resized for you. Currently, we resize all images over 1200x1200, and automatically create a thumbnail image for you. This image size may change based on server performance and user feedback. The good news is that you don't have to worry about any of that. Just upload whatever you've got, and Glowfoto™ will handle the rest. How long will my images be available? We will be periodically clearing out images when they grow old. This will occur when the server fills up. The good news is that this isn't likely to happen for a very long time. At any rate, Glowfoto™ is intended to support users who need to store images for the short-term (a few months up to a year), so don't expect your family's precious photos to be archived here into the year 2137. They will be removed at some point. We do plan to offer long-term, organized image hosting for registered users in the near future, so stay tuned. Can I create an account? Can I manage my uploads? Yes, you can. You can register for a free account here. How do you make money? Haha! I like/hate this! Who can I compliment/scold? If you like something, or you think something is confusing, broken, lame, stupid, or if you just have a feature you'd like to see implemented, can you tell us about it? Use the Contact Form. Uploading multiple files is so annoying. Surely there's a better way? Indeed there is, sir/madam. You are looking for the drag and drop uploader. Hey, how come my animated gif isn't animated? Probably because it is huge. We allow animated gifs, but seriously, these 50+ MB animated gifs are just inefficient, uncompressed video files. As long as your animated gif is reasonably sized (less than 1 MB), we'll leave it animated. If you upload an animated GIF file larger than 1 MB, the thumbnail will be de-animated, but the original full-size GIF, viewable at Glowfoto, will remain animated, regardless of size. This allows us to allow you to upload huge GIF files without having to discard anything over 1-2 MB. But I want to hotlink! Somesite.com lets me hotlink! You can hotlink clickable thumbnails, and we allow thumbnails up to 400x400. Any bigger, and you'll probably start breaking tables. We also do this to allow us to serve your images without interruption. Smaller hotlinked images means less chance we'll have to do that bandwidth exceeded nonsense some other sites do. Who made this? Glowfoto is owned and operated by Glowdot Productions, Inc. What about video? There are already so many sites that do video well. But... we're thinking about it.