Beta testers needed for Zelaron's own image host!
 

Okay, so maybe it took me a while longer than initially expected, but here it is, Zelaron's own image hosting service! I decided to separate it from the Zelaron forum database to save some storage space, and brand it as a stand-alone service, so you have to sign up for it.

The service name is Picaroni, as a result from combining Picture with Macaroni. Not to mention that it sounds kind of like Zelaron. "Hey, anyone care to pass on the Zelaroni pickles?" Or maybe not.

So what kind of great features does this service offer?

1. It's perfectly free. You're not obligated to flash your Visa. In fact, you don't even have the possibility to pay anything as-is, even if you like the service. I'll probably put a PayPal donation button in there soon enough.
2. Upload images up to 1024 kb (1 mb).
3. Easy-to-remember URL for all images! For instance, a file named "myself.jpg" would be stored on the address picaroni.com/myself.jpg.
4. Browse your images on a list with small thumbnails, about the size of an avatar on this forum.
5. Image browsing of images you have uploaded is restricted to your own account.
6. No bandwidth restrictions. In case we would hit the roof (which we won't in the foreseeable future), I would pay extra to expand the capacity of the service.
7. No storage capacity for individual accounts. Should we run out, I'll invest in a new hard drive to store the images on.
8. Friendly tech support; myself! Okay, so maybe that isn't really a great advantage.

So what's the catch? Free image hosting? Free? Of course it's free. I put relevant ads on the site to hopefully help the service get by. And every 10th view of a large image will display a small, discreet watermark in the bottom right corner, hopefully to make the service popular. But it's still free, at least for you; the happy, innocent user.

It still has a few bugs, so I could use some help beta testing the service. If you find anything that needs to be patched, let me know.

Without further ado, here is the site address:


http://www.picaroni.com




Known bugs:

• Mozilla doesn't allow .jpg uploads. - FIXED
• Trying to upload a file without filling out the form causes an error - FIXED
• Gif images do not animate properly. - Requires new version of GDLIB to fix.
• Spaces in the file name, or capitalized file extensions breaks the displayment and/or image deletion. - FIXED
• Image auto renaming doesn't work after ImgName9.ext.

Cool, Chruser. I'm about to go sign up.

Well, I tried to upload a couple of images, and none of them would upload.

That's strange. What's the error, and what file types did you attempt to upload?

I just tried it; seems to work just fine.
http://www.picaroni.com/62904.jpg

I tried a jpeg file, didnt work.

Fixed it. Apparently, Mozilla gives jpg/jpeg files mime type image/jpeg, while IE names them image/pjpeg. I just had to add the case. This is to prevent other file types from (easily) being uploaded. In other words, you can't just rename .exe into .jpg to store it.

Just a couple of other things you might want to know:
1.) It doesn't show a thumbnail of my saved pictures to me.
2.) It saves the picture twice. For instance, it saved 13.jpg as 13.jpg and 12.jpg. It did this a couple of other times as well, with other pictures.

Eh I'm gonna sign up.

It shouldn't save pictures twice if you click only once. If you click twice, that might be another story. Since all images are in the root directory (easy to remember), I wrote a script that increments the file name with a number in order to prevent overwriting.

It let me upload a text file renamed as a jpg - http://www.picaroni.com/text_renamed_as_jpg.jpg

..Although, it DID change the text into this:

Also, the standard SQL injection trick didn't work ("or 1=1", you know the drill) so that's good, and all bad file types seem to get the error-in-the-file treatment, though it still uploads it without errors..

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Although, I just noticed that there seems to be no way to log out short of deleting your own cookies.

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I'll mention also that it allows you to sign up with a just a space for the email field, which I assume you want to be valid. (Unless you figure it's not a problem if they can't retrieve their password if they give a space for the email)

Also, I love the PORKY PORK messages

I signed up. This image hosting idea was an awsome idea. Its a pain in the ass finding a image host that doesn't go down every other day. I'll keep u posted on any bugz i find.

Thanks for helping me bug test Picaroni everyone. BlueCube, about the email part, I'll mess with syntax to get some form of checking to work. As-is, there isn't even a retrieve lost password feature, so it doesn't matter greatly. I will definitely take care of the logout page.

And as for the upload part, I have directed my safety measures at the actual displayment part. Even if someone could manage to upload a php file with functions that delete all files on the site, what good would it do them if it couldn't be run in the first place?

(And for the record, the images aren't really placed in the root)

Signed up.

You should put Zelaron in the "Links" content.

Images with a space in the name seem to break the deletion javascript.

"SpaceIn TheName.png" (1105 bytes) gives:
as the deletion link.

You might want to make it only allow image file types when it goes to browse files to upload. Just makes it easier for people (like me) who have tons of crap mixed together to find image files.

I've been alpha testing for months... and then you wiped my images, it's almost like a MMORPG! lolol

IE does not allow that, AFAIK

Okay, I rewrote the file system entirely. It took me quite a few hours to get all the details in place, but it should work now, and run smoother. I will attempt to retrieve the current images in the DB and store them as files, but apparently, lots of erroneous files have been uploaded and might be causing trouble. Either way, you are required to sign up again. This shouldn't become necessary again.

What about my pictures from 2 months ago?

i signed up... looks cool, but GIF's indeed won't woek --> http://www.picaroni.com/NeedleFighters5BIG.gif

also, why isnt BMP allowed ?

The pic you linked works fine for me.

Works fine here as well.

Also, BMP is horribly large. That image you linked:

• As a BMP: 616 KB
• As a GIF: 1.83 KB (No colors in this one, so it's nice and compressed)
• As a PNG: 3.39 KB
• As a JPG: 8.63 KB

So in this particular case, the BMP version is 33,661% larger than the GIF.

I'll just toss this link out there: http://www.r1ch.net/img-formats/

In conclusion, I'm going to guess Chruser would prefer to save a bit of bandwidth...

Actually, a BMP can be just as small as a GIF, since both support RLE; the difference is that in practice, RLEing a GIF is the rule rather than the exception, while RLEing a BMP is the exception rather than the rule.

As of now, all spaces are replaced with underscores, and weird file extensions become spelled in versals. I haven't quite figured out why yet, but capitalized file extensions (.JPG) causes problems with image displayment, although they store just fine. But so far, the service is fully functional.