I want to start an image hosting site and I am currently looking for a good image upload script, a free one if possible in order to get started. I am new to this so any advice is welcome. Should it support file uploads too? What features should I seek? would it be better to buy a pro script? What features save BandWidth? what others save CPU/RAM/SPACE?... Please I need your help.
lol, very funny man, I have some google notions but thanks for your help anyway. Let me be clearer then, what I want is ADVICE, what your experience taught you! I don't need A script, I need THE script.
You get what you pay for it seems... Depends if your server/servers can support it. A typical image is less than one megabyte, but someone could easily upload a several gigabyte split-archive, this would require you upgrading your server far more frequently, not to mention the bandwidth usage would be considerably higher when they downloaded it... Not to mention there's enough competition in this area already. Thumbnails? Forum embedding code? These are things which are exceptionally easy to implement (we're talking less than a minute for these 2 particular features, (for someone like me. ) Although a pretty AJAX upload + a straightforward control panel to view your uploaded images could easily persuade people to use your service. A Firefox plugin to take a screenshot and then upload it to your server is a little more complex, but easily manageable and exceptionally useful. Try and ensure the correct headers are being sent that encourage the end user to cache the image on their PC, this alone can save a huge amount of bandwidth. If you can afford it, most likely. I do need some work for after Jan 21st if want to hit me up, my fees may be a little higher than a typical programmer, but you get what you pay for. . Purging old images can work surprising well for this, at the risk of alienating your users. Just ensure your scripts which feed the images to the user's screen are optimized as well as possible, seeing as they will be hit many many times over their lifetime - micro optimizations are worth it. (And any PHP programmer worth their fee should do this anyway.) ... Better? Dan.
Yeah, that's better man Thanks a lot. I would love to hire you but I doubt you could do the job within my budget (close to very very little), so I guess I will first go for a free solution then upgrade to a pro custom made one when the start becomes more popular. Any free script you could think of that would be upgradable?