I'm being encouraged to offer image-hosting for members of my site.

I can not find any existing software to fulfill my needs. The only image-hosting applications I've found are those geared toward offering simple galleries in which limitations are only tracked and imposed when access is made directly through the application's interface.

Required Features:

Upload, rename, delete, view and categorize images.

Create account levels, allowing limitations on number of images, maximum size of images, maximum size of all combined images, number of views per image and combined views.

Track and impose the above limits.

I've only devised two solutions.

The first is to use ModRewrite and when a key path exists in the URL, kick off a script to update an SQL database to count the hit and calculate the bandwidth usage. If any limits are exceeded, the image is not displayed and access is denied. The downside is that ModRewrite, an SQL UPDATE/INSERT and an SQL SELECT for every image serged is a massive amount of overhead.

The second solution is to have a small script that parses the Apache log files on a regular basis (hourly?) and updates the database to calculate various usage stats. When limits have been exceeded, the script would back the original image up and replace it with a very small (few bytes) PNG containing an error message.

If anyone has input on this - or even better, happens to know of an existing application that I somehow could not find - please inform me!

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In reply to Image Hosting Application by Seumas

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