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Chevereto – build your own free image hosting service (review)

14 kwietnia 2009 przez Mircea Goia Zamknij Autor: Mircea Goia Imię i nazwisko: Mircea Goia
Email: mtb@mytestbox.com
Strony: http://www.mytestbox.com
About: Mircea Goia was born in Romania and imigrated to USA in 2005. He lives in Phoenix, AZ and works as web developer. Aside, he works also on several entrepreneurial Web projects. He shows a keen interest in commercial Web development such as social networks, viral marketing, online video. His artistic hobby is filmmaking with special interest in directing. See Authors Posts (76) Image Manipulation

In one post Techcrunch (the well known tech blog) said that ImageShack , the free image hosting service, has the most hosted online photos (the second one being Facebook ).
It boasts a number of 20 billion images and over 28 million monthly visitors, Facebook hosting about 15 billion (closing the gap fast) and having a 200 million registered members.
On Imageshack you go and upload a picture (or more), then you get an URL to that picture which you can post/embed in any webpage. That's it. You can do that without registering…but if you do register you get more features.

Now you can have a service almost like that (or like Free Image Hosting ) thanks to Chevereto , the free image hosting script. I am saying “almost” because, at that amount and traffic, Imageshack is a more complex operation than it seems at the first glance. Chevereto it's open source and licensed under GPL.

But on a much smaller scale this script can help you have a mini-service like Imageshack. It is the work of Rodolfo Berrios , a chilean web developer.

Let's dive more into the details.

First of all, take a look at this demo: http://demo.chevereto.com (it's in Spanish but don't worry, Chevereto script is multilingual and you will have the English choice too). Choose a picture from your hard drive or a remote picture (if you know the URL) and see it in action. On the next page you will have your picture uploaded and several links to that picture so you can copy/paste on another webpage or on a forum as well as sharing it on social media site like Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr.

See it? It's almost like Imageshack.

Let's see how to use this free image hosting script.

The requirements

To use the script your server needs to have several requirements fulfilled.

Don't worry, most of those requirements are fulfiled already by most of the hosting services out there (even some free ones).
- PHP 5 – the script is built using PHP 5 so your server need to support that (see more about PHP here )
- cURL – a library that allows you to connect and communicate to many different types of servers with many different types of protocols (more here )
- GD library – a library which can be used to create and manipulate image files in a variety of different image formats, including gif, png, jpg, wbmp, and xpm (more here )

And that's it. You don't need a MySQL database or any database (if Chevereto would allow registering then most probably you would need that too).

Download the script
The script can be downloaded directly from here: http://chevereto.com/download

The installation

1. Unzip the downloaded archive

The script is located in “ Upload ” directory from that archive but before deploying it make sure you read the documentation found in “ Docs ” folder (the Docs are in English and Spanish).

2. Configuring the “config.php” file

One drawback is that the config file is mostly in Spanish so if you are not familiar with this language you can use Google Translate to accomodate a bit.

- define the language of the script (define('LANG', 'en');): it can be in English, Spanish or Farsi (persian language used in Iran)

- define the application name and the tag line (define('APP_NAME', 'Demo Chevereto');  and define('TAG_LINE', 'Image Hosting');)

- the next 5 lines of code defines the working directories for this script (and if you need more assistance then there is a forum where you can ask questions)

- the next 7 lines of codes defines the variables for the images (how big would be the image allowed – in MB and Mb, the resolution). A special attention requires this variable “ $max_name = '10′; ” which tells the script how many characters a picture should have. Default is 10 characters and you might want to setup a little higher than that.

- and the next 5 lines of codes defines the specific configuration of the script (because I don't know Spanish you would have to use Google Translate to get an idea what exactly they mean)

- the FTP configuration: if you are sure all the settings above are correct but the script still doesn't work try to enable the FTP upload which are the lines below (starting with “ $use_ftp ” variable)

- the rest of the variables don't need changes

3. Upload the script on the server

With the help of a FTP upload program like Filezilla (free) upload the whole directory “ Upload ” to your server (you may name it something else or you can upload only the content of that directory, not itself).
Then go straight to your newly created image hosting service: http://www.your_server.com/upload
You'll be having the initial screen below.

4. Working with the script

As you see, there are some options there:
* Local/Remote: upload files from a local machine or a remote server (for a remote server you need to know the URL of that picture, something like http://www.the_server.com/your_picture.jpg )
Unfortunately, the script doesn't allow bulk uploading so you are confined to upload one file at the time (maybe the future releases will add this feature)

* Preferences: you can shorten an URL for that pic using TinyURL web service, so an URL of an image http://www.your_server.com/my_picture_in_Hawaii.jpg could become something like http://tinyurl.com/c9hu9o (this ios good for services like Twitter where there are limitations to the number of the characters you can use)

* Resize image: the image can be resized keeping the proportions (you need to specify just the width)

I forgot to mention, but Chevereto image hosting script uses a lot of Javascript ( Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries) for beautiful effects (these libraries are also used in the Ajax technology so much hyped in the former – already? – Web 2.0 era).

Now lets upload an image and see what we get.

After uploading the image name gets truncated at the maximum number of characters you have specified for the variable “ $max_name = ” (I let it for 10 characters).
Now you see the image (resized, if you chose that option) and how to share it (to include in any webpage or forums, including the short version of it from TinyURL). Of course, you can also share it on social media site like Facebook, Delicious and so.

The script puts the full image in the /images directory and the thumbnails are in /thumbs directory.

In the “ Docs ” folder open up the “ welcome.html ” page and read more there.
There are some options which are better explained there, in the Manuals, like Hotlinking (which can help you in limiting who can benefit from you image hosting – you don't want your service to be abused), Firefox Extension (yes, it has that) and the Bookmarklets.

And…that's Chevereto ! The free image hosting script. Not that complicated, eh?

This script is good if you want to have your small image hosting service but if you plan to compete with Imageshack (or Free Image Hosting ) then probably you will need something more scalable. That means you would need customization to this script (if you will use it).

Chevereto is not the only free image hosting script out there. You can find more scripts here: www.hotscripts.com (choose the programming language you want).

Try the online demo http://demo.chevereto.com !
Download the free and open source image hosting script Chevereto here http://chevereto.com/download !

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Tags: Add new tag , chevereto , free image hosting script , galleries , image hosting , image sharing , open-source , photo gallery , photo hosting , php

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