The images displayed here are not located in the WordPress Media File. Which means they are not taking up space in the meager 3 gigs of storage that is allotted to the free accounts.
I have discussed this privately, and in the comments, with a few of you over the past year or so. Photo files take up a lot of space. Solutions include scaling your images to a lower resolution (which is recommended if you sell your photos), or linking the images from an external source.
WordPress automatically downsizes your photos to about 82% of scale. Even at a lower resolution, they look just fine in a blog format. Still, it’s not difficult to fill up the storage within 12-18 months.
There are many reasons for someone to prefer the free account — not the least of which is the price of gasoline. Inflation is taking a huge bite out of people’s budgets. A paid upgrade might be considered by professionals, or those who earn a living from photography — in which case, I’d probably own a $10,000 lens as well — but I’m just a hobbyist.
So what do we do?
One solution is to simply start another free blog, but then you have the challenge of migrating your followers to the new address. Plus, the older blog sort of becomes like a dusty old book that no one ever reads. Ideally, all of your content would be displayed in one location.
— WARNING —
I received the following email from WordPress:
Storage does cost money, and if we do catch abuse of that, it would be a violation of our terms of service that can result in a permanent suspension.
To increase your storage properly, you do need a paid plan.
Alternatively, you can host your images elsewhere.
So, basically, there are only the two options — a paid upgrade or external host. Starting a new blog for the purpose indicated is a violation of the Terms and Conditions. Your blog could be shut down if you are caught.
As for an external host, many people use Dropbox. However, the free plan only gives you an extra 2 gigs of storage so it is not a viable long term solution. Last year, I opened a Flickr account. The free plan allows you to store 1,000 images or videos. That should last me five years or better.
How that works is that you simply copy and paste the URL of your Flickr photos into the WordPress text editor. Because the images are not stored in your Media Files, just know that you won’t be able to edit, resize, format or caption them on WordPress.
The images posted here are actually linked to my Blogger account. Google, the owner of Blogger, announced two years ago that it was ending its policy of unlimited free storage. Free accounts would be limited to 15 gigs of storage which is more than the WordPress Premium plan. However, bloggers were excluded from the limitation.
(Lens Artists Low Light Challenge.) The images presented are from my unpublished Sunset Silhouette collection. All photos are original size and in high resolution.
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In Pics and Words 