I have Carol to thank for putting me on to this, and I’ve now used it and think it’s pretty good.

If you have lots of photos hosted in your blog, they will start to eat into your bandwidth each time they are loaded by your readers, especially if they get ’stumbled’ or enjoy some other rush of traffic. An obvious way around this is to have the photos hosted elsewhere, and link to them in your blog.

As I’ve just started a photoblog, this was particularly at the front of my thinking, so, prompted by Carol’s post, I took a look at Divshare. They are a free filehosting service, who promise unlimited uploads of any file up to 200Mb each, forever. They also advertise unlimited downloads, no advertising on your photos (no pop-ups etc.) and fast reliable servers.

Even better for Wordpress users is the new plugin, that sits the DivShare uploader right  below your ‘Write post’ box. This means that as you’re writing a post, you can upload an image from your PC direct to your DivShare account, and then insert it and/or others already there straight into your post. You can also do some basic re-sizing, all without leaving your wordpress blog.

I’ve been using it today in the creation of my Autofocused photo blog, and it seems to work really smoothly - you can see for yourself how fast the photos load, so it’s a promising start.

Time will tell how well it works, but it’s worth considering if you like posting a lot of photos, or are nearing your bandwidth limits. Blogger and Typepad users can of course use DivShare now, but they are also looking at integrating it further in the style of the WP plugin. For free, it’s definitely worth a try.