Description
This is a very simple website offering uploading and sharing of 2 megapixel size photos, at a relatively high quality, social-media aware, and very hard to “steal”.
Motivation
A lot of free image hosting services are either overly ad-filled, or explicitly prevent uploading content which may be considered “NSFW”.
I wanted something less restrictive, less busy with ads (but still able to have ads on it), using some technologies which I would hope would facilitate fast I/O.
One principle was to try to always have the photo viewer coerced into visiting the website itself, as opposed to simply serving the image file.
This is accomplished by having the social media thumbnails relatively small, and a lower quality. Any attempt to actively open the image itself will always result in the webapp serving an entire page with the image embedded.
Technologies
I wrote this website is written in Java on the Apache Struts 2 framework accessing an HBase database.
Of the NoSQL databases, HBase seemed to be the only one which natively supports larger binary content, so it was a relatively easy option.
You can access the primary site here: https://photohosting.hostnucleus.ca/
To view an example of how the photos are presented: https://photohosting.hostnucleus.ca/show/cooked-chicken-on-white-plate-8de5b69c-020d-4480-addc-5d3af7013ba8.action
Update
Well, thanks to the complete cluster-fuck that is Java 11 (with it’s complete butchering of Java compatibility), and Apache’s lacklustre ability to move HBase away from Java 1.8, this project is officially dead. I simply cannot get the Tomcat webapp to talk to HBase.
So … yeah … fuck the OpenJDK “community”, and fuck Apache.