Introduction

Image Uploader is a powerful upload component designed for Web 2.0 projects, photo print services, galleries, social networks, e-commerce, and other upload-enabled and image-centric solutions. Its primary intent is making mass file uploads easy. Here, it enables upload of entire folders and on the fly ZIP compression of selected files before sending them to a server.

Image Uploader is a client-side add-on supported by the most of browsers and operating systems. It is shipped with the following facilities intended to integrate this add-on with Web solutions on various platforms:

• Image Uploader ASP.NET makes it possible to deploy and configure Image Uploader in Microsoft Visual Studio via design mode and handle uploaded data almost without coding.
• Image Uploader PHP is a collection of classes that allows PHP developers to work with Image Uploader in a usual way as with a common PHP object.
• Image Uploader JavaScript is a core client-side library used in both Image Uploader ASP.NET and Image Uploader PHP. This library does not provide facilities to handle uploaded data server-side; however, it is more flexible and can be used with any HTTP-compliant server platform (not only ASP.NET or PHP).

Image Uploader provides a rich functionality that can be used to solve a variety of specific tasks. 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. To illustrate this, let us highlight the most important Image Uploader features:

• Fast and fail-safe upload. Image Uploader sends files and additional data as fast as it can. To make the upload more reliable, it sends files in separate packages containing a few files and data. Moreover, Image Uploader can break large files into chunks and upload them one by one in separate requests. If the upload is broken, it can be automatically resumed without sending already uploaded files again.
• Pre-upload image processing. Image Uploader performs all the image-related operations client-side. It can recompress, resize, rotate, and crop images, apply watermarks, and extract EXIF and IPTC metadata.
• User-friendly upload. Upload process is indicated with a progress bar, thus, users always know for how long to wait, and they can always stop the upload process if it takes too long.
• Integratability and customizability. Image Uploader installation pack contains real-life code samples allowing you to integrate it in your existing solution with ease. The customizability of the POST request allows seamless data exchange between Image Uploader and third-party applications and APIs. As a tool, Image Uploader is designed to easily change its appearance. 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 any text captions and messages. This way you can translate Image Uploader user interface into any language.
• Upload files to cloud storages support. Image Uploader includes special extensions which allow uploading files directly to the cloud storage from a browser. 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 four editions: Express, Professional, Print, and Premium. Express and Professional editions are intended to be used in projects that do not require making thumbnails larger than 3 or 5 megapixels and the other printing-related features, namely, Web 2.0 solutions, professional solutions, e-commerce solutions, and so on. Image Uploader Print, however, is designed to be used in various pre-print and photo-print solutions. See the Comparison of Image Uploader Editions topic for more details.