A couple of line of JavaScript. That’s all you need.

This is a very short Image Uploader, based on imgur.com API. If you want to do more complex stuff (like resize, crop, drawing, colors, …) see my previous post.

Back-story. I’ve been talking to Imgur.com‘s owner (Hi Alan!). He recently added Drag’n Drop support to his image sharing website. But also, Alan allows Cross-Domain XMLHttpRequest (thank you!). So basically, you can use his API to upload pictures to his website, from your HTML page, with no server side code involved – at all.

And here is an example of what you can do:

(see the full working code on github – live version there )

(also, you’ll need to understand FormData, see here)

function upload(file) {

  // file is from a  tag or from Drag'n Drop
  // Is the file an image?

  if (!file || !file.type.match(/image.*/)) return;

  // It is!
  // Let's build a FormData object

  var fd = new FormData();
  fd.append("image", file); // Append the file
  fd.append("key", "6528448c258cff474ca9701c5bab6927");
  // Get your own key: http://api.imgur.com/

  // Create the XHR (Cross-Domain XHR FTW!!!)
  var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
  xhr.open("POST", "http://api.imgur.com/2/upload.json"); // Boooom!
  xhr.onload = function() {
    // Big win!
    // The URL of the image is:
    JSON.parse(xhr.responseText).upload.links.imgur_page;
   }
   // Ok, I don't handle the errors. An exercice for the reader.
   // And now, we send the formdata
   xhr.send(fd);
 }

That’s all :)

Works on Chrome and Firefox 4 (Edit:) and Safari.