I have a very large database of all items in a massive online game on my website, and so do my competitors. I however, am the only site to have pictures of all these items. All these pictures are on my server, eg. from 1.png to 99999.png (all in the same directory).
It's very easy for my competitors to create a simple file_get_contents/file_put_contents script to just parse all of this images to their own server and redistribute them their own way. Is there anything I can do about this?
Is there a way to limit (for example) everyone to only see/load 100 images per minute (I'm sure those scripts would rapidly parse all of the images)? Or even better, only allow real users to visit the URL's? I'm sure those scripts wont listen to a robots.txt file, so what would be a better solution? Does anybody have an idea?
Place a watermark in your images that states that the images are copyrighted by you or your company. Your competitors would have to remove the watermark and make the image look like there never was one, so that would definitely be a good measure to take.
If you're using Apache Web Server, create an image folder and upload an htaccess file that tells the server that only you and the server are allowed to see the files. This will help hide the images from the parsing bots, as Apache would see that they are not authorized to see what's in the folder. You'd need to have PHP load the images (not just pass img tags on) so that as far as the permissions system is concerned, the server is accessing the raw files.
On your PHP page itself, use a CAPTCHA device or some other robot detection method.
Related
I have seen many questions concerning the storage of user uploaded image files onto a web application, but most of these are dealing with the following:
Indexing of the images, so as to retrieve them later
How to store them (on the server itself as a file or in the database)
I have a question in regards to this subject, but the question is:
In what directory do I put the uploaded image file? (or other file type, for that matter)
I have a small group I am running php apps for. There is very little files that get uploaded, but nontheless, they get uploaded.
I currently have them in my public html document root under /var/www/images/* , however I am told that it is not smart to store your user uploaded content straight to the /var/www/* directory and that it should be stored elsewhere.
However I cannot find a straightforward statement of where "elsewhere" is.
Keep in mind I do not have a server farm where I can establish certain servers for specific purposes (such as uploaded user files).
Therefore, on a single webserver that hosts usual scripting files, etc. what is the best storage practice for such content?
Thank you.
I don't think there's necessarily a 'best practice' per se; anywhere on your server will be fine, so long as you're able to retrieve the images later on. Typically they'd go inside a folder under /var/www/images/.
Personally I'd recommend creating an individual folder to store these user-uploaded images in (as something like /var/www/images/user_uploads), so that they don't get confused with other images you might have uploaded directly to /var/www/images/ (such as backgrounds or core imagery).
I'm looking for a way to make a web server cache and provide resized images from another remote server.
Let's say there's Site A located somewhere in Africa. On Site A are JPEG images that are refreshed every five minutes (they're webcams). If you visit Site A from the US, the images take quite a while to load since the server is in Africa.
I have Site B. I would like Site B to display the four images from Site A, but I would like them to be served from a server here in the US (which is also where Site B is hosted). That way, they'll, of course, load much quicker.
I'm not familiar with script creation. I tried a few PHP scripts from CodeCanyon and the concept works, but there always seems to be a few minor bugs that cause the entire system to fail.
They work by providing the remote image URL after the local site URL (i.e. http://www.SiteB.com/image_cacher.php?=http://www.SiteA.com/image1.jpg). That's exactly what I want to do.
I'd like the cached images to be stored on the Site B server in a folder called "cache." That way, I can use a cron job to automatically delete the cached images every five minutes; the same frequency the webcam images are updated.
I've solved the cron job issue though, so my only dilemma now is creating some type of script (preferably PHP) that can achieve this.
There are many similar questions like this here, but they're all minutely different and I unfortunately haven't been able to find anything that can perform this task.
Thanks!
I’m using Zen Cart (PHP) for my web site. I have images that is on my supplier’s remote server and my site is on Host Gator the only way to get the images show up on my site is to connect to their server using links to the images (per agreement). They tell me that ZenCart PHP does not allow you to serve images from a remote host. And I need to have a PHP programmer take a look at the code to see if he can manipulate the source code to allow this. Does anyone have solution for this? Thank you!!
the other option is to sync images to a directory in your server from time to time (you can use rsync, wget etc.)
From glancing through the documentation it appears that ZenCart looks to see if a file exists in order to decide whether or not the image has a picture. PHP can do this over the internet, but it would mean that every time you opened a product webpage, there could be a dozen requests between your server and the supplier's server, just to see if image_MED and image_LRG and any other alternate images exist before your customer even gets to see the webpage, and then your customer would still have to connect to the supplier's server to get the image.
A programmer probably could alter ZenCart to remove all the alternate images, large images, image re-sizing and everything else that needs the actual image files to work, and allow it to use a URL hardcoded in the product database for the image. If you want to have large or alternate images, you'd have to have the programmer add those to the database too.
I have a flash .swf file that I embed on my webpage. On my server I have the .swf file and multiple image folders. I would like to load every file in one of those folders into the flash slideshow. How should I go about doing this? I tried used Air but it doesn't work on my system as an application so I doubt it will work online. Eventually I plan on making a menu where you can select different folders to display and since they are of different sizes, a foreach loop would be optimal. Keeping a txt file with the number of images is also possible if theres a way to read that in, but I would prefer the more dynamic approach. I am working towards using php for the website if that helps find a solution.
Thanks,
-Mike
Also my slideshow works great online currently but i have to hardcode in the number of files.
I would suggest to have a PHP script on your server that takes care of parsing those folders, and return the list of files to Flash (with a valid public URL).
Basically at your application startup, you would call the PHP script to retrieve the full list of file (XML is a good format to be returned, or AMF if you have a lot of folders/files).
After all you have to do is manipulate that data to load whatever folder/files the user is willing to see.
Just for your information, Flash doesn't have access to the Filesystem, so it's impossible to parse folders directly from Flash. (However It is possible with an Air Application)
I have a general question about this.
When you have a gallery, sometimes people need to upload 1000's of images at once. Most likely, it would be done through a .zip file. What is the best way to go about uploading this sort of thing to a server. Many times, server have timeouts etc. that need to be accounted for. I am wondering what kinds of things should I be looking out for and what is the best way to handle a large amount of images being uploaded.
I'm guessing that you would allow a user to upload a zip file (assuming the timeout does not effect you), and this zip file is uploaded to a specific directory, lets assume in this case a directory is created for each user in the system. You would then unzip the directory on the server and scan the user's folder for any directories containing .jpg or .png or .gif files (etc.) and then import them into a table accordingly. I'm guessing labeled by folder name.
What kind of server side troubles could I run into?
I'm aware that there may be many issues. Even general ideas would be could so I can then research further. Thanks!
Also, I would be programming in Ruby on Rails but I think this question applies accross any language.
There's no reason why you couldn't handle this kind of thing with a web application. There's a couple of excellent components that would be useful for this:
Uploadify (based on jquery/flash)
plupload (from moxiecode, the tinymce people)
The reason they're useful is that in the first instance, it uses a flash component to handle uploads, so you can select groups of files from the file browser window (assuming no one is going to individually select thousands of images..!), and with plupload, drag and drop is supported too along with more platforms.
Once you've got your interface working, the server side stuff just needs to be able to handle individual uploads, associating them with some kind of user account, and from there it should be pretty straightforward.
With regards to server side issues, that's really a big question, depending on how many people will be using the application at the same time, size of images, any processing that takes place after. Remember, the files are kept in a temporary location while the script is processing them, and either deleted upon completion or copied to a final storage location by your script, so space/memory overheads/timeouts could be an issue.
If the images are massive in size, say raw or tif, then this kind of thing could still work with chunked uploads, but implementing some kind of FTP upload might be easier. Its a bit of a vague question, but should be plenty here to get you going ;)
For those many images it has to be a serious app.. thus giving you the liberty to suggest a piece of software running on the client (something like yahoo mail/picassa does) that will take care of 'managing' (network interruptions/resume support etc) the upload of images.
For the server side, you could process these one at a time (assuming your client is sending them that way)..thus keeping it simple.
take a peek at http://gallery.menalto.com
they have a dozen of methods for uploading pictures into galleries.
You can choose ones which suits you.
Either have a client app, or some Ajax code that sends the images one by one, preventing timeouts. Alternatively if this is not available to the public. FTP still works...
I'd suggest a client application (maybe written in AIR or Titanium) or telling your users what FTP is.
deviantArt.com for example offers FTP as an upload method for paying subscribers and it works really well.
Flickr instead has it's own app for this. The "Flickr Uploadr".