I was wondering about what you said about linking to a direct image being tricky.
As far as I can see, you can put the link to imgur (like http://imgur.com/gKt0Owa) or directly to the image (http://i.imgur.com/gKt0Owa.jpg) and both (as well as the html, bbcode and markdown versions) appear directly in the image page.
It's tricky because your direct image link redirects me to the full page with ads, and it's not obvious to you. Try hard refreshing your image link.
(I'm pretty sure the way it works is: it shows the image for certain referrers, and when you load the "full" page it requests the image with a referrer of imgur. That way you get the image, and then subsequent requests to the image are served from your browser cache so the direct links work)
Weird... I actually tried with a couple of different browsers (FF, Chrome and Safari) to check that it wasn't me logged in or something like that. Could it be ip-based, as I did all my tests with the same computer? Hmm...
Anyway, thanks for expanding on it; I've shared a few images through imgur and never had this issue (maybe it was before this change, or maybe the people receiving them never complained), so I was a bit puzzled by your comment.
I've been able to reproduce it with different browsers on the same computer. I'm not sure of the exact strategy, but it's just a big UX problem that I don't know what I'm sending another user.
... aaaaand now I want to make a malicious image host that always shows you your uploaded images but serves up goatse to anyone you link it to. Or maybe just flips the images, upsidedownternet style.
As far as I can see, you can put the link to imgur (like http://imgur.com/gKt0Owa) or directly to the image (http://i.imgur.com/gKt0Owa.jpg) and both (as well as the html, bbcode and markdown versions) appear directly in the image page.