Introduction

Image Uploader is a powerful upload component designed for Web 2.0 projects, photo print services, image galleries, e-commerce and other image-centered and/or upload-enabled solutions. Its primary intent is making mass file uploads easy. Here, it enables the uploads of entire folders, ZIP compression, user quota, and basic image processing functionality.

Image Uploader involves ActiveX control (for Internet Explorer) and Java applet (for Mozilla Firefox, Safari, etc). Both components provide almost similar functionality. Image Uploader is purely client-side application which sends user-specified files to a server in HTTP POST request, thus, you can receive and process these files with any HTTP-compliant server platform.

Image Uploader provides rich functionality that can be used to solve a variety of specific tasks. This way, it can be used in a wide range of solutions and meets the requirements posed both for the upload workflow and for the upload tool itself. To illustrate it, let us highlight the most important Image Uploader features.

• Pre-upload image processing. Image Uploader performs all the image-related operations client-side. It can resize and rotate images, apply watermarks, and extract EXIF and IPTC metadata. Furthermore, Image Uploader provides client-side ZIP compression and ability to send any additional data along with files.
• User-friendly upload. Upload process is indicated with a progress bar, so the user always knows how long to wait, and they can always stop the upload process if it takes too long time. Moreover, the user can resume broken uploads without having to send already uploaded files again.
• Integratability and customizability. Image Uploader installation pack contains everything required to integrate it in your existing solution with ease. Here are real-life code samples for the most popular server platforms, Image Uploader ASP.NET control, which allows embedding and configuring it in Visual Studio, in design mode, and Image Uploader PHP library that allows using Image Uploader as a common PHP object. As a tool, Image Uploader is designed to change its appearance easily. It provides a rich functionality to replace buttons by your images, customize colors, fonts and other look and feel settings, and even change panes layout - all this allows you to adapt Image Uploader to your website look and feel. Furthermore, you can modify not just Image Uploader appearance, but also any text captions and messages. This way you can translate Image Uploader user interface to any language.
• Upload files to cloud storages support. Image Uploader includes special extensions which allow uploading files from browser directly to cloud storage. The most popular storages Amazon S3 and Nirvanix are supported. The Uploading to Cloud Storages topic contains the detailed instructions on how to implement it.

Image Uploader is available in three editions: Express, Standard, and Professional. Express and Standard editions solve most uploading tasks whereas Professional is intended for photo printing solutions. See the Comparison of Express, Standard, and Professional Versions topic for more details.