Recently, one of my photographer friends want to generate extra money by creating a free stock photo website. Apparently, he have a bunch of unused stock photos. He plan to install ads banner once his website got enough visitors. He want to make use of Dropbox to host his images since he want to offer high-res photos. You know, it would takes more server resources to handle many request of download high-res photos.

My friend want to use Dropbox since once his current account exceed the maximum capacity (2 GB), he can create another accounts for more images. By the way, my friend doesn’t want to upgrade his Dropbox account to premium.

You need a little trick to host images on Dropbox for your website. Normally, you can embed an image to a webpage by pasting the full path of the image URL. Something like https://www.bettertechtips.com/wp-content/photos/dropbox.png.

The method above doesn’t apply to Dropbox images. If you paste the full path of image URL from Dropbox, for instance https://www.dropbox.com/s/ww7d4dru9w6ru4t/DSC_1825.JPG, it will appear as a link, not image. You need to modify the link structure to get the staff you want. Here is how to do it.

• Login to your Dropbox account and specify an image you want to embed. Click the Share button to generate a, URL of the image.

• Click the Copy link link to get the URL.

• Before pasting the URL, replace the last 4 characters of the URL (dl=0) with “raw=1”. Your URL should be like this one

Before: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ww7d4dru9w6ru4t/DSC_1825.JPG?dl=0

After: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ww7d4dru9w6ru4t/DSC_1825.JPG?raw=1

Next, paste the URL you have just modified anywhere on your website, it should appears as an image instead of link. If your website is built with WordPress, you can also read this post to learn more how to embed images from Dropbox.