About PictureToLink
PictureToLink does one job well: you give it a picture, it gives you a link you can paste anywhere. No account, no app, no waiting.
Why we built it
Sharing a photo should be simple, but many image hosts bury the link behind sign-ups, pop-ups and slow pages. Others keep the original file untouched — including the GPS coordinates many phones silently store in every photo. We wanted a tool that is fast on a phone, gives you the exact link format you need, and protects your privacy by default.
How it works
- Compression. Each upload is re-encoded with modern encoders so it loads faster and uses less data, while keeping it sharp. You see the before-and-after size.
- Privacy. Embedded metadata — GPS location, camera model, timestamps — is removed from every image. We never store original files or file names, and IP addresses are only kept as one-way codes for abuse prevention.
- Control. Every upload has a private delete link, and you can make images delete themselves after an hour, a day, a week or a month.
- Fair retention. Images stay online while people keep viewing them; ones nobody has opened for a year are removed, which keeps the service sustainable and free.
How PictureToLink is funded
The tools are free. We show Google ads on our articles and tool pages to cover hosting costs. We never place ads on the pages that show your images, and we never sell personal data. You can change your ad and analytics choices at any time with “Privacy settings” in the footer.
Our articles and editorial standards
The PictureToLink blog publishes practical guides on sharing images, compressing photos, image formats and online privacy. Articles are written by the PictureToLink team with the help of AI writing tools. Before publication every article is checked against official documentation (for example from browser vendors, platforms and standards bodies). Compression figures quoted in our articles come from files we actually processed.
We correct mistakes promptly. If you spot an error or something has changed, please tell us and we will update the article and its “Updated” date. Our editorial policy has the details.
How we test
When an article or tool page quotes a file size or a percentage saved, it comes from running a fixed set of test images through our own tools. We don’t quote results for tools we haven’t run. The test set:
- Three phone-sized photos from Pexels (free licence): a 3024 × 2016 bouquet with a soft background, a 3000 × 2000 close-up of hydrangeas with lots of fine detail, and a 4032 px wide outdoor photo that was already well compressed.
- A low-light photo: a 5000 × 3333 street scene at night by Bence Szemerey on Pexels, to show how dark, noisy images behave.
- Two screenshots: a 1366 × 900 web page with photos in it, and a 1440 × 900 page of plain text.
- A logo: our own 512 × 512 PNG with transparency and a limited colour palette.
- An animated GIF of 480 × 270 pixels.
Uploads are measured with the same code the uploader runs on our servers (sharp and libvips), for each quality setting, WebP output and resizing. The in-browser tools, such as the “compress to KB” pages, were measured in Chrome with their default settings. Every page that quotes a result names the image and the date. Results depend heavily on the picture, so treat them as examples rather than guarantees.
Safety and abuse
Our Terms of Service ban illegal, sexual, violent, infringing and abusive images. Anyone can report an image through our report form, and we remove content that breaks the rules and block it from being uploaded again.
Contact
Email Admin@picturetolink.com or use the contact form.