Bandwidth Considerations for Photo Hosting

[Andy]

I was coding an image upload script for people to use on my site to upload their photos.

The problem is that they are likely to upload large digital camera photos. I was wondering if this would cause my hosting bandwidth to be affected from the size of the uploads.

So I did a test by uploading a 2MB+ sized jpeg image. I noticed that the bandwidth usage was unchanged after the upload i.e. the figure reported in my control panel. Is this correct?

This is good news since it means my customers don't have to manually resize the images themselves. But I will suggest they avoid uploading huge files to avoid a long time lag.

Some hosts may only have a 2MB maximum upload file size, my one is 64MB. You can also specify the maximum file size in your web form. It took about 60 seconds to upload my test file.

Once the file is uploaded, my script resizes the image to a maximum dimension and creates a thumbnail image. Then the file is an acceptable size for displaying on my web site.

Example code for re-sizing an image using PHP can be found here: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.imagecopyresized.php

[mariancarpan]

It depends on the hosting plan you have chosen, I suggest using a dedicated server or at least a vps.