I built a free image and video hosting tool after Imgur blocked the UK
On 30 September 2025, Imgur blocked the entire United Kingdom. No warning. No migration tool. No grace period. One day it worked, the next it didn't — and with it went millions of embedded images across forums, Discord servers, tutorials, Reddit threads, and personal blogs. Grey boxes everywhere. I'd been thinking about building a proper image hosting tool for a while. That was the push I needed. What I actually built DBimg is a free media hosting and sharing service. The pitch is simple: upload a file, get a permanent direct link, share it anywhere. Here's what that looks like in practice: No account required — anonymous uploads work out of the box No compression — files are served at original quality, always Permanent hosting — no expiry dates, no "inactive account" deletion Automatic EXIF stripping — GPS and metadata removed on every upload Instant embed codes — HTML, BBCode, and Markdown generated automatically REST API — API key support for developers who need programmatic access Global CDN — fast delivery wherever the link gets shared 75MB free / 250MB Pro — covers most real-world use cases without friction Supported formats: JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, AVIF, HEIC, BMP, TIFF, MP4, WebM, MOV, AVI, MP3, FLAC, WAV, and more. Why I built it this way Imgur was originally built by a Redditor, for Redditors. It was frictionless by design — drop an image, copy a link, done. No account needed, no compression, no nonsense. Then it got acquired. Then acquired again. Then the NSFW purge happened in 2023. Then anonymous uploads disappeared. Then compression got heavier. Then ads got more aggressive. Then the UK ban. Each decision made sense from a business perspective. None of them made sense from a user perspective. What frustrates me about this pattern is that image hosting isn't technically hard. Serving a file from a CDN is a solved problem. The thing that's hard is committing to doing it simply and not gradually enshittifying it in pursuit of growth metrics. That's what I w