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Reddit rolls out its own image hosting service (sorry, Imgur)

Imgur has long served as the de facto image hosting platform for users on Reddit's forums, but the popular website is looking to keep it in-house.

Luke Lancaster Associate Editor / Australia
Luke Lancaster is an Associate Editor with CNET, based out of Australia. He spends his time with games (both board and video) and comics (both reading and writing).
Luke Lancaster
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Reddit and Imgur may have fit together like peanut butter and jelly, but Reddit's product team announced earlier this week that the online community would be rolling out its own image hosting service, leaving its old informal partner somewhat in the lurch.

Reddit's own service will allow image uploads of up to 20MB in size or gifs of up to 100MB to be submitted directly when posting to Reddit. It also means less jumping around between images and discussion threads for users, and better integration with Reddit's apps. In comparison, Imgur allows a similar maximum image size and gifs of up to 200MB.

It seems like the new tool first appeared on Reddit's mobile apps. Phase one of the staggered rollout will see the tool available on 16 of Reddit's default subreddits (themed discussion boards) before rolling out to another 50 next week.

Reddit's new platform doesn't preclude the use of Imgur (or other image hosting sites), but a locally hosted platform could certainly spell more traffic for the site. Another major concern is the ability to police the content that gets posted to the site. As an admin said in the announcement thread, images posted through Reddit's upload tool must comply with the site's content guidelines.