I built a free image and video hosting tool after Imgur blocked the UK

Dann B. — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:51:46 +0000

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 wanted DBimg to be — the thing Imgur used to be, with the one thing Imgur never cared about: privacy.

The privacy bit matters more than people realise

When you upload a photo from a modern phone, it contains EXIF metadata — the camera model, the software, the timestamp, and often the precise GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken.

Most image hosts either ignore this or actively use it. DBimg strips it automatically on every upload, before the file hits the CDN. You don't need to think about it or opt in. It just happens.

This is what got Imgur into trouble with the ICO in the first place — handling user data, including children's data, without adequate safeguards. Building privacy in from the start rather than bolting it on later isn't just the ethical choice, it's the one that keeps you out of regulatory trouble.

The technical stack (briefly)

Built with Next.js on the frontend, with a custom upload pipeline that handles format detection, EXIF stripping, and CDN distribution. The API follows standard REST conventions with bearer token authentication — straightforward to integrate with ShareX, scripts, or any tool that supports HTTP POST.

The gallery and category pages are statically generated for performance, with dynamic revalidation on new uploads.

Nothing exotic. Boring tech on purpose — the kind of stack that's easy to debug at 2am when something breaks.

What's next

A few things on the roadmap:

Password-protected uploads — share a file with a specific person without making it publicly accessible
Expiry dates — optional, for when you want a link to stop working after a set time
Bulk upload improvements — better UX for uploading batches of files at once
Upload history without an account — session-based tracking so anonymous users can manage their uploads without signing up ## Try it

If you need image, video, or audio hosting that just works — no account, no compression, no expiry — give it a go.

👉 dbimg.app

Drag, drop, share. That's it.