My previous article titled, “How To View Private Photobucket Photos“, went over the privacy issues with Photobucket, but now you may be wondering, “is Imgur private?” and that’s just what I’m going to go over in today’s article.

Imgur Album Privacy

Imgur technically has 2 ways to keep albums on Imgur private: hidden albums and secret albums.

• Hidden albums cannot be viewed on your imgur page or by searching for them, although anyone who has the URL will still be able to view these albums.
• Secret albums are “completely private” (or so Imgur claims) and they cannot be viewed by anyone, even with a URL. Any attempt to view these albums on an account that did not upload the image will result in a 404 error page.

Even if you choose to make your album secret (which is honestly a much better choice than “Hidden”), the privacy settings of an album will have no effect on the images in side of those album. This means that even if your album is marked as secret, any user with the URLs of the images can still view the images inside the album.

Imgur Image Privacy

Unlike the album privacy settings, there is no “hidden” privacy setting to keep individual photos on Imgur private. Instead, individual images on Imgur are private by default. Any private images will not be searchable and they will not be viewable unless another user accesses the image via URL.

Unlike Photobucket, Imgur URLs are less predictable as they are randomly generated and are not based on the album or file name.

Conclusion: So Is Imgur Private?

If you’re still wondering, “is Imgur private”, then allow me to answer that for you here. While Imgur certainly has more privacy than Photobucket, it’s important to note that none of these images are truly private if they’ve been uploaded to a website on the Internet as, in the event that someone gains access to your account, the images could easily become public (Imgur even states on the help section of their own website that, “AN IMAGE CAN NEVER BE SECRET.“).