Finding a new file hosting site sounds easy in theory – there’s certainly no shortage of options – but can take some thought. Just tracking down key details like the maximum file size or how long files are kept often takes longer that you expect.

All this research is important if you’re hosting mission-critical work documents, of course, or anything similarly important: you need to be sure you’re making the right choices.

But if you’ve just got some big personal files you’d like to share with a couple of friends then File & Image Uploader makes the process quick and easy.

The program arrives as a single portable executable. Drag and drop the files you’d like to share onto its main window and the Upload dialog appears.

Here you can choose your target hosting service from 550+ (RapidShare, MediaFire, WikiUpload, VideoBam and many more). If you don’t have a preference, use the arrow keys to move up and down the list, and File & Image Uploader displays helpful details like the maximum file size and storage time.

Files can be uploaded in parallel for better performance

Once you’ve selected a service, then there are a few other options available. File & Image Uploader can split files larger than some defined figure, save them in a password-protected archive, use a pre-existing account for that service, maybe queue the files for uploading later.

Alternatively, if you don’t care about any of that, just click the button with the green tick and your files will be uploaded. (Well, probably; if the service uses captchas then you’ll be prompted to solve them. One service ignored our answers and kept re-prompting, but we gave up, tried something captcha-free and everything was fine.)

As the program works, a report pane lists all successfully uploaded files, along with their file and delete links. Select one or all of these, right-click and you’ll find options to generate BBCode or HTML links, copy them to the clipboard, save everything to a text file, and more.

This mostly ran very well for us, but if you’re unhappy with the default settings then there are plenty of tweaks. On the connection side alone you can set your http buffer size, proxy, parallel upload count (1 to 8) and maximum speed, as well as scheduling to run your upload at a more convenient time.

Put it all together and File & Image Uploader is a very handy tool, configurable and easy to use. Give it a try.