Imageshack and its Increasingly Restrictive Practices

This post is due to the fact that I used to use imageshack as my primary image host.  I grew to like it over time, as it offered image hosting without the need of registering and giving them your email address.

A few months ago, things changed, and they required you to register in order to get the direct link to your image.  You could get around this rather easily by right clicking and copying the image location on a zoomed in lightbox view.  I got the idea that they were doing this because they wanted more people to register.

Well, my suspicions proved correct, and a few weeks ago imageshack turned from being an image host without the need to register to one where registration was mandatory.  Now I'm not against registration per se due to the improved features granted to you, like being able to view all the images you uploaded, being able to delete your images, and so on, but I would still like the ability to upload images without the need to register, and I think many users feel the same way.

Now for users who prefer to not register to upload images to an image hosting site, is this the end of using imageshack?  Actually not, and I think imageshack has underestimated its users.  It turns out that all they did was place a non-closeable lightbox around the page that lists all the links to your image.  However, all the links to the image, and the page itself, are still there-you just can't copy the links, and you can't see the whole links because they are too long for the text field.

All of the items of a page are written in the HTML of a site, so let's get those direct links to the image.  Go to imageshack.us and upload an image without registering.  After doing so, you will be presented with a non-closeable lightbox asking that you register.  Let's not.  Instead, let's pull up the page source by pressing Ctrl-U on most browsers.

Now, let's find the direct links.  Press Ctrl-F, and type in what you can see of the link beside where it says "Direct Link" in the "Links to share your image" section(it usually looks something like "http://img###.imageshack").  By typing what you can see of the direct link into the Find bar of the Page Source, you'll be able to see the full direct link.  Copy that and now you can use it just as you would any other direct link.

So it involves a workaround in going into the page source and typing in the first few letters of the direct link, but you can still use imageshack without registration.  Imageshack has severely underestimated the abilities of their users.  You would think that they would know that a (possibly high) number of users of their site are uploading images because they are building websites, and those who build websites commonly know some basic HTML.