How to Use Blogger As an Image Host

Most users of Blogger.com think of it as simply a blogging platform. However, it can also be used to host images that can be referenced from anywhere on the Internet. Here’s how it works.

When you create a new blog post on your Blogger account, you have access to a menu from which you can upload images. Since picture illustrations are important parts of blogs, most bloggers have used this feature. You have a pretty good amount of freedom in adding images to your blog. With your Google account, which your Blogger account shares, you have access to up to 1 GB of picture storage.

If you want to use your Blogger account as an image host, create a new blog post and upload the image(s) that you want to host on the Blogger server. If you don’t want to actually publish the post (you probably won’t if you’re simply using the post as a way to upload images), you can choose to save it as a draft instead. The fact that Blogger doesn’t provide an option for uploading images outside of creating a blog post indicates that Blogger’s intent isn’t to have its system used as an image host. However, there are some advantages to using Blogger’s setup for hosting images as compared to some of the other free image hosting services. The main advantage, especially for those whose images will be viewed excessively, is that there is no bandwidth limitation.

Accessing Your Image

After you have uploaded an image through a blog post, you can access it by right-clicking the image and choosing copy link location. If you then visit the copied link location url into another browser window, you can see where the image is stored.

To access the direct URL of your stored image that you’ll need to use for hotlinking, you need to right-click on the image from the previous step (Copy Link Location) and select Copy Image Location. You’ll notice that there is a slight difference between the two. The first step produced a url similar to this.