Image Uploading

[The Hobo]

I'm trying to think of the upload method I want to use for my news script.

Right now, I have it so that when the user uploads a file, it renames the file to ####_##.ext, where #### is the news item ID (such as 42), ## is the image number (such as 2, since multiple images can be uploaded with each post), and ext is the extension, either .gif or .jpg.

So if I'm posting an item and uploading two pictures, they would be renamed to: 42_1.gif and 42_2.gif

I think this is a good method as it's also easy to determine which files were uploaded with each post, since the numbers before the _ will match the post ID.

However, this can be confusing to anyone looking at the file names, as they're not very straightforward as to what the picture is.

So should I keep my method, or should I just keep the name the user gives to it (and check to make sure that name isn't already used)? What method seems most beneficial?

[bekkel]

if the news is only a picture.. it would be nice to know what the picture is about..
you can add a field with a description,.?

[The Hobo]

...? I have no idea what you're talking about.

[da_silvy]

You could have two different names, the original uploaded name and the news post assigned name, except there'd be a difference.

I'll try to explain

You have someone upload a file, say:

hellothere.gif

You're on the 42nd news post, and this is the first image, accordingly, you upload it as

42_1.gif

But, when you have that image in the newpost, get it to call another script, which will send back the name of the original image, in the header, but with 42_1.gif as the actual image

You'd need another table for the original names, but I think that would work.

Then the actual image on the page would be hellothere.gif but it'd be sourced from 42_1.gif and wouldn't affect the server side name of the image.

Sort of understand ?

[The Hobo]

I understand, but I'm not storing any of this in a database. Just in a folder on the server.

The only link it has to the database is an image tag that would be in the news post.

[da_silvy]

42_1_hellothere.gif

[CornedBee]

I hope you allow the uploading of PNGs too.

[The Hobo]

Originally posted by CornedBee
I hope you allow the uploading of PNGs too.

I don't even know what a PNG is, but if I had to guess...I'd say an image file format?

[The Hobo]

Originally posted by da_silvy
42_1_hellothere.gif

I suppose I could do that. I just hope their image names aren't "this_is_a_picture_of_my_fish_that_sadly_died_last_winter.jpg"

[CornedBee]

PNG (Portable Network Graphic, pronounced ping) is a W3C-approved image standard designed in 1995 to replace GIF, when the license troubles about GIF started.

It is a lossless compression format for palettized (up to 256 colors) or true color (up to 16 bit per channel = 48-bit color) images with binary or full alpha (binary alpha is what GIF has, full alpha means partly transparent is also possible).
Compression is about as good as GIF, usually even slightly better.

Despite all advantages, Internet Explorer was so slow to pick up support for the format that PNG was nearly forgotten again - to this day IE needs a special trick to show transparent PNGs properly. A very special one.

PNG is not capable of animations like GIF. There is a separate image format for that, known as MNG (Multiple Network Graphics), which again is far superior to Animated GIF, with the downside of requiring a very complex decoder and even more complex encoder.
Support for this is virtually nil. Internet Explorer needs a special plug-in. Mozilla had native support, but it was taken out because of the size of the decoder. You can download special builds of Mozilla which still have it, or build your own. Konqueror supports it AFAIK, don't know about Opera and Safari.
Usage therefore is nearly nil too. The default skin for Firebird used to use some MNG graphics, but they were changed to Animated GIF when MNG support was taken out of Mozilla.

But PNG is now getting more popular again, and it would be a grave error to disallow uploading of this format.