I've been considering image hosting services for a project but am starting to wonder if that's just too complicated for my target audience as they'd have to upload all their images to the hosting service and then "attach" the images to the CSS file using the links the hosting service provides them. While that's a fairly simple process for us developers, I'm thinking that might be a large barrier to getting user buy-in for this feature.
I could simplify by hosting and serving the images myself but I'm worried about potential scalability issues that could present which I don't have the hardware or bandwidth to handle at the present time.
My thought is that I could have users upload their images and CSS to the server in a single zip file to the web server which could then extract the files from the zip, push the images on to an image hosting service, programmatically get the corresponding URL from the service and update the CSS accordingly before attaching it to the user's display profile.
This approach could kill both birds with one stone, I wouldn't have to worry about the bandwidth issues caused by serving potentially large images on every profile request and the user doesn't have to go through the headache of needing to set up an account on an image hosting service.
Does anyone know of any image hosting services that I can programmatically integrate with that has good reliability and performance that could assist me with this conundrum?
Thanks in advance
Review the Picasa Web Albums Data API:
If you've signed up for Google+ then photos up to 2048x2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes won't count towards your free storage.