Development I'm running a free image hosting service

Hey bit,

I'm now running a free image hosting service: http://www.imgwow.com/
Any tips and suggestions for the site? I'm thinking I'll try work in user accounts at some point to allow people to track their images.

Comments and constructive criticism (and use) welcome

 

I'm not trying to be mean here so don't take this the wrong way ^^;

question: what's special about your site that makes me want to use it over like imageshack or tinypic?

The reason why I ask this is a lot of people already have accounts on those sites and are quite happy with them (such as me). What does your site offer that those sites don't?

 

Meh... there aren't any laws against another image hosing site. There's also no usage or privacy policy... so we don't know what we can and can't upload, or what's going to happen to the images if we do. You might want to check if your host will hold you responsible if someone uploads kiddie porn - 'imgwow.com is not responsible for content uploaded' might not be an excuse.

EDIT: Also, are you not going to give any credit to the people who actually put most of it together? Yours seems very similar to this.. even if their work is open source.. seems the right thing to do

 

I was just experimenting with one tbh, it's not intended to replace the mainstream ones. It's basically for my own personal use + friends and people I work on projects with. I'm just offering the service if anyone happens to want it and it's a test site to allow me to tinker with it.

In regards to the one you linked, that's indeed the engine. I was tinkering with the code to add the 'images hosted code' and I think I replaced the link to them with that. I never noticed so I'll need to have a look in the history and bring it back.

I'm new to php so I'm currently stripping the engine back and figuring out how it works and adding more. I was looking to learn PHP and an acquaintance suggested taking a simply ready running php site and reverse engineering it. Image hosting seemed like a good choice.

 

going to be a spanner in the works here.

Some people upload their images to keep them safe and for an extended period of time, for example years. How long do you envisage the current database to be held for and are the pictures safe from hardware failures etc?

Couple of things to consider.

 

You've taken a GPL licensed codebase made some changes (you claim) and not published the derivative work under a GPL. You've not even given the new site a new look and feel, just copied the entire site from their demo and removed the "Powered by" link.

That's really not on, open source only works if people stick to the rules.