If you wanted to start a free photo uploading site, but didn’t want to pay the fixed storage and bandwidth costs of Amazon’s S3 or another CDN service, you might be interested in the free ImageShack API. Currently, it allows you to upload a photo to the ImageShack service, and get back the image’s size, a photo URL, and a thumbnail URL. You can access their API by using a simple ImageShack php class:

class ImageShack 
{
    var $is_url = “http://www.imageshack.us/index.php”;
    var $is_result = false;
    var $is_result_parsed = false;
    
    public function upload( $file )
    {
        // send the image to ImageShack
        $ch = curl_init($this->is_url);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 240);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, array( ‘xml’=>‘yes’, ‘fileupload’=>‘@’.$file ));
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array( ‘Expect: ’ ));
        $this->is_result = curl_exec($ch);
        curl_close($ch);
        
        // Parse the result
        $this->parse();
    }
    
    public function get_image_url()
    {
        return $this->get( “image_link” );
    }
    
    public function get_thumb_url()
    {
        return $this->get( “thumb_link” );
    }
    
    public function get_done_page()
    {
        return $this->get( “done_page” );
    }

    public function get_resolution()
    {
        return $this->get( “resolution” );
    }
    
    public function get_size()
    {
        return $this->get( “filesize” );
    }
    
    private function get( $key )
    {
        if( !$this->is_result_parsed )
            return false;
        
        return( $this->is_result_parsed[ $key ] );
    }
    
    private function parse()
    {
        if (strpos($this->is_result, ‘<’.‘?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”iso-8859-1″?>’) === false)
            $this->is_result_parsed = false;
            
        $xmlData = explode(“\n”,$this->is_result);
        $xmlr = array();
        
        foreach($xmlData as $xmlDatum){
            $xmlDatum = trim($xmlDatum);
            
            if($xmlDatum != “” && !eregi(“links”,$xmlDatum) && !eregi(“xml”,$xmlDatum)){
                $xmlDatum = str_replace(“>”,“<”,$xmlDatum);
                list($xmlNull,$xmlName,$xmlValue) = explode(“<”,$xmlDatum);
                $xmlr[$xmlName] = $xmlValue;
            }
        }
        
        $this->is_result_parsed = $xmlr;
    }
}

Accepting file uploads in PHP is almost trivial. You just need a form on a web page somewhere with multipart encoding, such as:

<form enctype="multipart/form-data" id="uploadform" method="post" action="http://example.com/path/to/upload">
<input type="hidden" name="MAX_FILE_SIZE" value="1048576">
<input id="anchor_file" type="file" name="files[]" />
<input type="submit" value="" id="submitimages" name="submitimages" />
</form>

On the server side, you need to iterate through the special $_FILES array in PHP:

for($i = 1; $i < count($_FILES['files']['name']); $i++){
    $error = $_FILES['files']['error'][$i];
    if($error !== 0) break;

    $data = array(
        ’name’ => $_FILES['files']['name'][$i],
        ’temp’ => $_FILES['files']['tmp_name'][$i],
        ’size’ => $_FILES['files']['size'][$i]
    );

    // do something with $data now, like upload it to ImageShack
}

With these bits, it’s easy to write a wraparound interface to ImageShack. In the future, I hope their API also includes being able to query for photos, comments, and ratings after uploading; at the moment I see now way to do that.

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  Sid 1 month ago 1 point

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  I would love to do it - but I can't figure out how to make it work - Someone help!
  
  My email is - sid1 [at] gmx [dot] com
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  http://www.medicaldoodle.com /people/f95fddb38998b8f3fefe5986bfe064d7/

 

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