A free image hosting service launched in 2004, PicVault provides automatic thumbnailing and several types of galleries. The site has served nearly a billion images.

PicVault was an early project of mine born out of convenience. I was sharing photos on my blog and in forums actively, and it wasn’t convenient to upload and attach them through each site I used. I developed PicVault in PHP using the GD image library and imagemagick image manipulation package.

PicVault allows uploads of images in most common formats and generates high quality thumbnails. It keeps track of your past uploads in a very basic account area, tied together by only an e-mail address, and allows creation of arbitrary galleries from the images in the account.

Every image view is tracked and counted in order to prevent out-of-control bandwidth use by passing requests through a PHP handler that records the view to a database then serves the requested image.