I’ve blogged before about some of the technology behind the free DirtMind image gallery so here’s some more…

For a long time I’ve wanted to make uploading and using images on forums simpler. FireFox gives us the capabilities to do this since when writing a firefox extension you’ve got access to a bit more functionality than you normally do from javascript as it’s trusted code.

The mission, upload an image by right clicking on it, generating all necessary BBCode.

The solution:

1) Write a nice XUL user interface for adding right click options to the firefox browser, selecting a local picture, establishing selection of a remote picture and providing nice upload feedback

2) Using the firefox extension encode the local image, or download a remote image and encode it (without saving a local file – that would be cheating)

3) Upload to the image host, decode the image data back into a picture.

After that it’s easy  because we’re just into the normal serverside image processing stuff that the image host does.

Here’s some screenshots of it in action:

Selecting an image to upload

The image uploaded

Because of the other stuff I’ve blogged about before in terms of image captioning and deep site integration with phpBB you can now upload an image, caption it and post it extremely easily. Check out this HQ video of the whole process!

Or watch in in lower quality on youtubte: