1.) Use jpegtran to Patch the Adobe Photoshop/ImageMagick bug

When users save images in Photoshop 7.0 as jpegs, then upload them to a PhotoPost powered site that uses ImageMagick, the resulting resized images are sometimes corrupted (and once viewed in a user's browser, these corrupt images cause image display problems in IE across all web sites during the user's browsing session). This is because Photoshop embeds incompatable XML data into jpeg images. We've added support to the latest PhotoPost versions (3.3 and newer) for a utility called jpegtran, which strips out the XML data from image uploads before ImageMagick resizes the image.

To use jpegtran, first find out if your server already has it installed. Use the command "locate jpegtran", or cd / to your root directory and run find . -name jpegtran. If you can't find it, download the unix/linux binary or the windows binary and move the jpegtran file into your photopost directory.

Once you know the path to the jpegtran binary file, enter it into the appropriate location in config-inc.php (see the instructions in config-inc.php).

2.) Prevent Bandwidth Stealing

Often times users will embed links to images within html pages or forum posts on other sites, which causes your server to use up bandwidth delivering their images to every visitor to that forum or HTML page where the user embedded the image. To prevent that, here's one implementation.

If your server supports .htaccess files, create a file called .htaccess in your PhotoPost 'data' directory and put the following in it:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://([a-z0-9-]+\.)*YOUR DOMAIN* [NC]
RewriteRule /* http://%{HTTP_HOST}/Your PhotoPost directory/index.php [R,L]

Change "Your PhotoPost directory" to the name of your photopost directory. For example, TechIMO.com's installation of PhotoPost is accessible via http://www.techimo.com/photo/index.php, so for us that line would read:

RewriteRule /* http://%{HTTP_HOST}/photo/index.php [R,L]

If you get a server error, check and make sure that your web host supports the RewriteEngine.

3.) Minimize diskspace/bandwidth requirements

If your server diskspace or bandwidth requirements are limited, you can conserve resources using these powerful options in the "Edit Options" control panel. Experiment with one or all of these settings to achieve your desired result:

• Save and display medium and large images? -- Set this to no
• Thumbnail image max width and height in pixels -- Set this to as small a number as desirable. Typical thumbnails are 100 pixels wide/tall. If you disable medium/large images, you may need to set this number to 150 or so in order for your users to discern any meaningful detail from the photos.
• Max diskspace for each user in bytes -- The default is 2,000,000 bytes or 2 Mbytes. Set this number according to your own personal preference and diskspace capacity. A low number will likely encourage your users to upload small filesize photos so that they can upload as many photos as possible.
• Show Most Recent Additions on Index page? -- If you set this to "no", you'll save bandwidth by not displaying the thumbnail images at the bottom of your PhotoPost front page.