Need Recommendations for Image-hosting Sites

[Siniri]

I recently gave up my home internet, and very shortly I will also lose the limited amount of free webspace that came with that. I currently use it to host my avatars, sigs, screenies, etc., although I did recently acquire a digital camera (not sure if I'd want to make my photos available on-line, though). I liked it because I could make my website non-publicly available (so it wouldn't show up in internet searches), but I could still host images there and have them appear, for example, on PPT.

I have a Facebook account but obviously don't want to put Neopets screenies on it; I also have gmail and hotmail accounts and have no idea if either come with free upload space (or how visible images saved there would be -- e.g., could I link to them to get them to appear at PPT?). I've viewed friends' and relatives' Photobucket accounts but have never created my own account.

I also have privacy concerns -- I wouldn't necessarily want someone to be able to easily see all my various images by going to my account, but I would like to be able to see them myself, and if I link to them, have them appear in other places (e.g., posting an image in a forum). I don't think I'd need a ton of space, but I would like whatever service(s) I use to be free. I'd also like it to be low-maintenance, spam-free, easy-to-use, and preferably non-expiring.

Sooo... does anyone have any recommendations for me? Thank you in advance for your help!

[Blue]

I've been very happy with PhotoBucket. It meets all of your criteria... It's Free, holds up to 500MB of pictures. You can make the album private, which I will assume makes your pictures unviewable by others unless they have a direct link (such as [img] tagged files). I just changed my account to "Private" and a checked few existing links and they still seemed to show up fine.

Uploading pictures and grabbing the stored location [img] code is simple.

I never really worried about the privacy there, as I do not have any private pictures, only screenies and/or avatars/sigs, etc. I'm going to test drive the private option.

[Siniri]

Thanks, Blue. I'll start checking Photobucket out.

[Ange]

I second Blue. I've had an account there for years, no problems. Setting privacy levels is really easy, too.

[Siniri]

Thanks, Ange. The other site I've heard a bit about is flickr. How does it compare to Photobucket? (I'm actually about to go try to answer that question myself, so I might edit in the answer later. )