What are we going to do about it?

• Add enhanced admin controls to let me quickly view and moderate uploads by group, and view and moderate the old uploads which are not in the database
• Place all new photos into a moderation queue until they are rated for content by at least three people
• Add a cookie-based preference which must be set before a user can moderate content, so that users agree they are adults in their countries and warning them that they might see anything that has been uploaded
• Place all X-rated content after moderation into a nasties queue for me to action
• Consider implementing a SVM to detect pornography in the images themselves
• Create policies which define what a pornographic image is

Until we can prevent, filter, eliminate, and ban pornography, the site will be disabled. On the upside, with a clear policy in place and human reviewers, it should become easier for us to handle this kind of content.

Tagged with: human reviewers, customer abuse, pornographic image, pornographic images, random images, least three people, svm, new photos, moderation, queue, uploading, pornography, uploads, preference, and adults

Other improvements soon to come include a progress bar on the loading screen, caching on all static pages for improved speed, and client-side checks in javascript to prevent you from wasting time uploading a file type we cannot accept.

Tagged with: side checks, random logo, couple examples, loading screen, logo image, page images, progress bar, wasting time, pimp, improvements, and photo

We’re still storing your photos using Amazon S3 so they’re safe and secure for all time, but downloading them will now occur through Distributed Cache Node 1 hosted on FeiFei.us, a 2.8 TB / month server. So far (and you can go check out IMGFLYDCN1 yourself) it is caching 1,394,848,217 bytes and 14,201 files.

The reason for this is that using Amazon S3 to transfer files is prohibitively expensive. I can’t afford to be paying $300+ a month for bandwidth:

The solution is a distributed cache network I’ve rolled out, starting with Fei Fei dot US:

The technical details are quite simple: A visitor requests static.imgfly.com, which decides which cache server to forward the request to. Currently this is quite simple–all requests go to IMGFLYDCN1. In the future, as ImgFly grows, we can scale the bandwidth demands by adding additional servers in rotation.

My ultimate goal is to make this complete server-side configurable, so that I can simply add the server URL, login, and password to a form and automatically provision the machine with the proxy-client software. The server software will actively monitor the performance of client proxies, so if one goes down it can transparently fail over to the others. Additionally, the clients will make available metrics (hit / miss ratios, number of items, size, bandwidth used, bandwidth left) that the server can poll and track. It could be set up so that once a given client reaches a certain metric limit, it’s automatically pulled out of rotation.

As always, comments are appreciated!

Tagged with: amazon s3, bandwidth demands, proxy solution, fei fei, proxy host, proxy client, cache server, visitor requests, server url, client software, proxies, server software, metrics, server side, technical details, ratios, provision, tb, servers, and photos

Personally I think is a beautiful sketch.

Tagged with: and sketch

Tagged with: and animated gif

Got any others? Link them from the comments!

Tagged with: and photo uploaded

What is ImgFly?

ImgFly is an easy-to-use image hosting service that lets you quickly upload images for use on blogs, forums, ebay, or myspace. You select the files you would like to upload, hit go, and are taken to a permanent page which lists all the photos you just uploaded!

Features

• Free, unlimited image hosting
• Permanent “forever” hosting of your photos
• Multiple-file upload with AJAX
• One click copy/paste of html, bb, or url code
• Automatic thumbnails
• Full-size lightbox previews
• Collection pages for each set of photos, and photo pages for each individual photo
• Reliable, distributed servers

Screenshots

Uploading a series of photos

Viewing a photo and its associated links

Viewing a thumbnail full-size with lightbox

Where’s My Photo?

If you uploaded a photo in the past, well, it might not be here. We did our best to preserve the collection, and moved 216,000 photos totalling 15.97GB from the old host to our new mirroring hosts. For example, this old file shows up fine, but for reasons outside my ability to control, this one does not. If you don’t see your photo, drop me a note, and then just try reuploading it.

For the future

If there’s a feature you would die without, leave a comment for us! We want to make this something real, something you want to use, so feel free to send us email anytime. We’re eager to make you, our customer, happy. In the future we plan to offer hosting for other kinds of media (audio, video) as well as improving the meta-data surrounding every item in the media collection.

Tagged with: content distribution network, meta data, ebay, url code, global content, multiple file, photo pages, file upload, copy paste, ajax, image hosting service, backend, new features, thumbnail, hosts, ip address, bb, servers, images, and photos

Enjoy!

Tagged with: user experience, and advertisements

Thanks again to everyone that has been so helpful in the transition.

Tagged with: life news, enhancements, footer, business name, improvements, and transition

Thanks again to all the new sponsors, and the great patience that all the members and users here have given me in the transition.

Tagged with: digg, patience, and transition