There are plenty of web services around to host your photos, music and video files, but most have a range of problems. In particular, they’ll surround your content with intrusive ads, slowing page load time and – depending on their use of tracking – perhaps compromising your privacy.

MediaCrush works a little differently. There are no ads. There’s no use of tracking, no records kept of how you use the service. You can even check this yourself, as MediaCrush is entirely open source.

Files can be shared from a basic browser interface, or you can try the Windows client. The latter accepts files of up to 50MB in size by dragging and dropping, before uploading them to the site. Each file is then allocated its own URL, like https://mediacru.sh/L7E6WPHT1SxR . Pass this to a friend and they’ll be able to view images, play music, watch your videos or download any of your content with the MediaCrush web player.

Drag and drop a file onto the PC client and it’s uploaded, ready to be shared

The PC client also has a basic screen capture feature. Press Ctrl+PrtSc at any time, select a rectangular area you’d like to capture, and that image will be uploaded, ready for sharing with others.

One unusual plus here is that MediaCrush converts animated GIFs to MP4 videos, reducing their size so they load more quickly. These results can be dramatic, too. Our GifCam-created animation dropped from 754KB to 209KB, and that was already well optimised: others may shrink by 90% or more.

There is a notable omission in the lack of any client history. If you close the MediaCrush program then any links you’ve created will be lost, perhaps a hassle if you won’t want to use them until later (or you need to reuse the links several times).

Embedding music and videos is a little awkward, too, as you must use some custom IFrame code (see below), which won’t work everywhere.

<iframe src=”https://mediacru.sh/L7E6WPHT1SxR/frame” frameborder=”0″ allowFullscreen></iframe>

MediaCrush is a likeable service, though, ad-free and easy to use. If you only need to share one or two files on an occasional basis then it could work very well.