Some offer more advanced tools such as the ability for anl to ato an image they uploaded, sideloaders, or browser sidebars.
Other hosts have introduced novel features such as the ability to automatically resize images down to a user-selected size.
A Flickr tool allows one to upload photos using a camera phone with email capability.
Showing advertisements to users has enabled image size and bandwidth limits to increase.
Paid services often allow users to have password protected photo albums, customizable skins, and customized subdomains.
Also, on the early web, some technical knowledge was required to know how to even make an uploaded image display on a discussion forum.
Typically, images would accessed using a URL format similar to: but to make the image actually display in a discussion forum, this would need to be manually rewritten in HTML markup in the forum post, as One of the primary new features of the early and developing Web that enabled the easy sharing of images and other data, was the concept of being able to upload or HTTP POST a file via the web browser to the remote server.
This alone helped to eliminate all the complex steps of needing to understand command line tools like FTP or uploading via a modem terminal.