Flash Image Hosting, Free Temporary Image Upload That Deletes Itself After One Hour
Flash Image Hosting is a free temporary image host built for the moment when you need a public link to a picture and nothing more. Drop in a screenshot, a photo or a diagram, and you get a direct image URL plus ready-made HTML, BBCode and Markdown embed codes. One hour later the file is deleted from the server and the link stops working. Compression runs inside your browser before the upload begins, so the file that reaches us is already smaller and already stripped of EXIF and GPS metadata. There is no account to create, no email to hand over and no gallery your image can be discovered in.
Table of Contents
What Temporary Image Hosting Is
The idea: A temporary image host gives a file a public web address for a fixed, short period and then destroys it. Traditional image hosts are archives, they keep what you upload indefinitely, build galleries around it and encourage accounts so you can manage a growing library. That model fits a photographer building a portfolio. It fits badly when you simply want to show one person one picture.
Why the expiry matters: A link that dies on its own removes an entire category of problem. You do not have to remember to delete anything, the image cannot be quietly indexed and resurfaced months later, and a link pasted into a chat log stops being a liability once the conversation has moved on. The file existing for exactly as long as it is useful, and not one minute longer, is the whole product.
What this is not: This is not a backup service, a portfolio or a CDN. Do not use it as the image source for a website, a forum signature or a product listing, because the picture will vanish within the hour and leave a broken image behind. For anything that must stay online, use permanent hosting.
How to Upload an Image
Three ways to add a file: Drag one or more images onto the upload area, click it to open your file browser, or simply press Ctrl+V anywhere on the page to paste an image straight from the clipboard. That last one is the fastest route for screenshots: capture, paste, upload, without the file ever being saved to disk.
Choose a compression level: Balanced caps the long edge at 2560 pixels and re-encodes at high quality, which suits nearly everything. Smaller file drops to 1920 pixels and trades a little detail for a noticeably lighter result. No compression uploads the bytes exactly as they are, which is what you want when the pixels themselves matter, a screenshot of fine text, or an image someone will inspect closely.
Upload and copy: Press Upload and each image is processed in turn. Every result card carries a live countdown to deletion, the before-and-after file size, and five copy buttons for the different link formats. Add several images at once and each one gets its own independent link and its own hour.
How the Compression Works
It runs in your browser, not on our server. The image is decoded into a bitmap, redrawn onto an HTML canvas at the target dimensions, and re-encoded as WebP at the chosen quality. All of that happens in JavaScript on your own machine. Only the finished, smaller file is uploaded, which is why a 40 MB photo can produce a link in the time it takes to send a file a fraction of that size.
Why WebP: WebP typically produces files 25 to 35 percent smaller than JPEG at visually equivalent quality, and unlike JPEG it supports transparency, so a PNG with an alpha channel survives the conversion intact. Every current browser displays WebP, so the resulting link works anywhere you paste it.
When compression is skipped: Animated GIFs are uploaded untouched, because drawing one to a canvas would flatten it to a single still frame. If the compressed result comes out larger than the original, which happens with images that are already heavily optimised, the original is kept instead. You never end up with a bigger file than you started with.
Privacy, EXIF and GPS Data
Metadata is removed as a side effect of compression. Photographs carry an EXIF block describing the camera and lens, the exact date and time of the shot, and very often the GPS coordinates of where you were standing. Re-encoding through a canvas reproduces the pixels and nothing else, so that entire block is discarded before the upload starts. If you choose No compression, the file is sent as-is and any EXIF data it contains travels with it.
The link is the only key. Each upload is addressed by 128 bits of randomness, which is not something anyone guesses or enumerates. There is no gallery, no browse page, no recent-uploads feed and no search. An image is reachable only by someone holding the exact link you shared, and the serving route is marked noindex so search engines will not list it.
What we can see: Files sit on our server for up to an hour, so unlike our purely client-side tools, this one does receive your data. That is unavoidable for any image host, a public URL has to point at a public server. If an image is sensitive enough that a stranger holding the link would be a problem, do not upload it here.
Direct Links and Embed Codes
Two different addresses, on purpose. The direct link points at the raw image bytes and ends in a real file extension, so forums, Markdown renderers and chat clients recognise it as an image and display it inline. The share page wraps the same image in a viewer that shows its size, format and a countdown to deletion, the better thing to send a person, because it explains itself.
Ready-made markup: The HTML snippet wraps the image in a link back to the share page. The BBCode version does the same for phpBB, XenForo and similar forum software. The Markdown version works in GitHub issues, Reddit comments, note apps and static site generators. Each one is a single click to copy.
Supported Formats and Limits
Formats accepted: JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, AVIF and BMP. AVIF is worth calling out because several popular image hosts still reject it, even though modern phones and screenshot tools increasingly produce it. Format is verified by reading the file's magic bytes on the server, not by trusting its extension, so a renamed file cannot sneak through as something it is not.
Size limits: Up to 65 MB per source file. After browser-side compression the upload itself is capped at 20 MB, which realistic photographs never approach, a 50 MB camera file typically lands somewhere between 500 KB and 3 MB once resized and re-encoded. If you pick No compression and the original is over 20 MB, choose a compression preset instead.
Rate limits: Uploads are limited per network address and protected by an invisible bot check. Ordinary use never encounters either; scripted flooding does.
When to Use an Expiring Link
Bug reports and support threads. Attaching a screenshot to a ticket or a chat message often means fighting an upload limit. A direct link sidesteps that, and the expiry means a screenshot of your half-open inbox is not sitting on the internet next year.
Showing something to one person. A photo of a part you need matched, a page of a document, a diagram sketched on paper. It needs to exist long enough for one person to look at it.
Testing and development. A real, publicly reachable image URL for testing an embed, an Open Graph preview, a Markdown renderer or an image-loading path, without polluting a permanent host with throwaway test files.
Moving an image between your own devices. Paste on the desktop, open the link on the phone. Faster than email and it cleans up after itself.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Using it for anything permanent. The single most common error is embedding one of these links in a website, a forum signature, a wiki or a marketplace listing. It will work beautifully for an hour and then leave a broken image. This tool is explicitly the wrong choice for that.
Treating an unguessable link as a private one. The URL is effectively impossible to guess, but anyone you send it to can forward it, and anyone can save the image while it is live. Unlisted is not the same as confidential.
Uploading the only copy. There is no recovery, no trash and no restore. Once the hour is up the bytes are gone. Keep your original.
Choosing No compression out of habit. For screenshots of text it is the right call. For a photograph from a phone it means a much slower upload for a difference nobody will see on screen.
Acceptable Use
This service is provided for lawful sharing of images you have the right to distribute. Uploading illegal material, content that infringes someone else's copyright, or material intended to harass or impersonate a person is prohibited, and short retention is not a shield against any of it.
If you find a link hosting something that breaches these terms, send it to our contact page and it will be removed. In practice most reports resolve themselves, because the file is deleted automatically within the hour regardless.
Frequently Asked Questions
Retention notice: Every image uploaded here is permanently deleted one hour after it is created, and there is no way to recover it afterwards. Keep your original file. Do not use these links anywhere that needs the image to stay online.