• Welcome to the Chevereto user community!

    Here users from all over the world gather around to learn the latest about Chevereto and contribute with ideas to improve the software.

    Please keep in mind:

    • 😌 This community is user driven. Be polite with other users.
    • 👉 Is required to purchase a Chevereto license to participate in this community (doesn't apply to Pre-sales).
    • 💸 Purchase a Pro Subscription to get access to active software support and faster ticket response times.

Considering hosting images for our members

Paul Schmehl

Chevereto Noob
We have run a hobby website for antique Chevy and GMC truck owners from all over the world for almost 20 years now.. Stovebolt.com We have a very active discussion forum running UBB software, a gallery where we provide a handful of photos and short story for members' trucks, and a ton of helpful content such as technical articles, links to parts providers and service providers, etc., etc.,

In the past, we have encouraged our users to use services like Photobucket to host the photos of their trucks. Now, Photobucket is preventing third-party image hosting without a large expense for our users. Google's Picasa site has gone away.

So, now we are considering hosting images for our users, but we have some requirements.
1) We MUST have the ability to approve account requests. If we do this, we will only host for our members. All member applications in UBB must be approved before they have access, and their first four posts must be approved before they get full access. We would want similar control over image hosting. (We own the servers and have shell access, so installing, configuring and maintaining software is not an issue.)

2) It would be helpful if the account registration included a field where the user could enter their member number from our forum (or, alternatively, their "handle" - called Display Name in the UBB software.)

3) We have no idea what the space requirements for such software would be. What is the average size of a user's gallery of photos? We have about 300GB of free space on our server but fear that may not be nearly enough.
 
Photobucket is preventing third-party image hosting without a large expense for our users.
Did you mean *with?

How many members do you have?

You can close open registration with your Chevereto site and approve only forum members.

If you limit the image size (file size) to something like 800X600 you can store about 3200 pictures at roughly 400MB.
 
Thanks, Focker. Photobucket now charges $399/yr or $39.95/mo for third party hosting. IOW, if you put your photos on Photobucket but want to display them somewhere else (like our forum), you have to pay them to do so.

We have 43,590 members right now. I'm sure not every one of them would choose to use the service, if we set it up.

I know that some members will put a ton of images up and others will only do a handful. (For example, I have about 12MB of photos of my truck on Dropbox in 9 photos.) So I was wondering what the average gallery size is on an active site. If 1,000 of our members put up photos, and the average gallery size is 12MB, then that's obviously not going to be a problem for us. But I know some people have hundreds of photos on image hosting sites.

I'm assuming that the software is configurable as to the location of the photo directories. Our largest storage area is in /var. (I'm running FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE.)

We're also considering charging a small fee for the service. Is that possible with chevereto?
 
We're also considering charging a small fee for the service. Is that possible with chevereto?
No.

Just have member's pay through PayPal.

The forum I belong to accepts donations to keep the site running without ads, but we have a built in gallery.

I started a Chevereto site after the PB fallout. I charge users through PayPal. I refuse to use ads in order to pay for my server.
 
Chevereto is not integrated with any CMS (users) and it doesn't allow you to charge fees to your users. You can manually insert users (web gui).

In your case, simply restrict image embedding for your target website only. By doing that, the system will only display images at your allowed domains and everybody else linking from any third-party website will be forbidden.
 
In your case, simply restrict image embedding for your target website only. By doing that, the system will only display images at your allowed domains and everybody else linking from any third-party website will be forbidden.
I forgot about this... It's a great idea.

Since I charge, I don't restrict the images to only forum related images.
 
Chevereto is not integrated with any CMS (users) and it doesn't allow you to charge fees to your users. You can manually insert users (web gui).

In your case, simply restrict image embedding for your target website only. By doing that, the system will only display images at your allowed domains and everybody else linking from any third-party website will be forbidden.
Thanks. My concern is, we don't want anyone in the world to be able to get an account. Is there an account approval mechanism in the software?
 
That's a possibility, certainly, but being able to control account creation is critical for us. With this software, I would have to handle creation manually, by request. I would prefer something where account requests are made by the users and placed in a queue, so I could approve them daily.
 
That's a possibility, certainly, but being able to control account creation is critical for us. With this software, I would have to handle creation manually, by request. I would prefer something where account requests are made by the users and placed in a queue, so I could approve them daily.
Force them to use the "Contact" form and you would get a notification or setup a thread on your forum. At first it would be very busy, but eventually calm down after a couple of weeks or so.
 
Force them to use the "Contact" form and you would get a notification or setup a thread on your forum. At first it would be very busy, but eventually calm down after a couple of weeks or so.
Is there a way to do that? I've narrowed the possibilities down to Chevereto and ImgShot. ImgShot has the user features I need and allows us to charge for accounts natively, but its appearance is rather kludgy. Chevereto (apparently) doesn't have any user management features but looks much more professional.

One thing I've noticed in researching image hosting software is that the documentation is extremely light on the account management side. Lots of details on picture handling, manipulation and quality, but precious little on account features.
 
What exactly does that mean?
It means that I appreciate the time you take to show me this pitfall in the system but that I won't work in fix that problem, at least not in the short term and that I wish you luck in your search.

I won tell you that I will work on that because you will expect a time frame and I'm unable to give you that. I'm about to start development for the next major version so everything is relative.

Try the free edition, you can use it long as it suits your needs.
 
Is there a way to do that?
One thing that you could do (but it's work) is to manually register a new user once they pay. This would allow you to match user names with the forum name.

What I can tell you for sure is, I don't think you will find another image script on the market that offers such personal support from the author and its users. You may have to get a little creative and think outside of the box, but once you get the hang of it you can control just about any factor you put your imagination to.
 
Back
Top