The next plugin added to the Weblog Tools Collection plugin competition blog is ImageShack Offloader. This plugin uses image hosting service ImageShack to host your images (as well as them being uploaded to your own site) and automatically replaces the the image URL with the imageshack URL so you can simply turn it off when you no longer want to use ImageShack.
I have never been a big fan of hosting images in other places, but the way this plugin works, by replacing URLs on the fly seems a good compromise.
Unfortunately I just couldn’t get this to work. I tried it on a few blogs and nothing ever reached ImageShack. There isn’t an obvious reason why, I got no errors, so for now it will have to remain unreviewed.
If you’ve tested it yourself and it worked then please let me know what your thoughts are of it.
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That’s a pretty cool idea Leland, although it might cost more in processing power than you saved in bandwidth (I don’t know though).
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I don’t like to rely on third-party sites either. That’s why I wrote it in a way that’s completely reversible.
Thanks for the suggestion. I did look at tinypic but didn’t find a public API, so I didn’t go further.
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I’ve never been a big fan either of hosting images elsewhere, or generally being dependent on third-party sites at all. While I wouldn’t personally use this plugin, I think it could be very useful to people trying to cut down on their bandwidth. That is, assuming it works…haven’t tested it myself yet.
I wonder if there are any other image hosting services that this type of “offloader” plugin could theoretically work with? For example, maybe it could upload to ImageShack and TinyPic, and if one of them is down, it could revert to the other, or if both are down, it could default back to the image hosted on your own server. Just an idea…
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I don’t like the idea of hosting images elsewhere either. I think some people would quite appreciate it though.
I could see a use for it if someone was trying to host their blog on a freebie hosting service or if they in trouble of being kicked off their shared hosting account and wanted to reduce their load as much as possible.
I’m frantically trying to get my own plugin ready for submission but development is taking longer than I’d like :( Hopefully I’ll have something for you to review before July though!
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Hi Scribu,
I did check those things first. The images were under 1MB and I have Curl installed on all the servers I tried it with. There are no errors logged.
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Hello, thanks for this post. Regarding your problem, it may have several causes:
- your server doesn’t have cURL installed (I’m trying to make it work without cURL)
- the images are larger than 1MB.
Have you checked the php error logs? If so, could you please post them somewhere?