Reddit breaks up with Imgur, introduces its own image hosting service

Until now, uploading images to Reddit was impossible. Users would normally upload images on Imgur and share the links on Reddit, a practice that Imgur must have been quite happy with because of the sheer volume of traffic generated by Reddit.

Andy, who claims to have recently joined Reddit’s product team, introduced Reddit’s in-house image hosting feature on, well, Reddit . Saying that he was grateful to the other image hosting services that “have been an integral part of how content is shared on Reddit,” he adds that Reddit’s own service is designed to bring a more seamless experience to users.

We would surmise that this step has primarily been taken to enhance the experience of using Reddit’s app and mobile services, which have, in our experience at least, struggled with handling images.

You’ll be able to upload images up to 20MB in size and gifs up to 100MB in size. The service will also streamline navigation as tapping on a Reddit-hosted image will lead directly to the post and comments rather than out of Reddit to a service like Imgur. Viewing gifs within Reddit’s native app will also be simpler, says Andy.

The feature will initially be activated on 16 subreddits and will expand to 50 more next week. The following communities will be supporting Reddit image hosting right now: GetMotivated , EarthPorn , Gaming , Space , OldSchoolCool , Sports , Art , Aww , Dataisbeautiful , Food , Funny , Gifs , mildlyinteresting , movies , photoshopbattles and pics .

Of course, with Reddit hosting its own images, it will now also be entirely responsible for policing its own content. Let’s just hope it’s up to the task.

Just to be clear, Reddit isn’t interfering with its current integration with third-party image hosting services like Imgur, it’s just giving users the option to use Reddit’s own image hosting service.