Free Image Hosting PHP Script — Imgur-Style Community

ImgZip is a self-hosted, Imgur-style image sharing community — the biggest build in this series. v2.0 turns the gallery into a small social network: free member accounts (username + password, no e-mail), user profiles with follower counts, following users AND topics (tags), a personalized "Following" feed, and six emoji reactions on every post alongside the classic up/downvotes.

The built-in meme generator is the fun part: pick a template or upload any image, type top/bottom text, and either download the finished meme as PNG (rendered client-side on a canvas — no server round-trip) or post it straight to the feed with one click. GIFs are first-class: animated GIFs upload untouched and get a GIF badge in the masonry feed. Every post also has a Share & embed box with direct link, Markdown, HTML and BBCode snippets.

The admin panel covers the whole community: posts (approve / hide / delete — deletes also remove files from disk), comments, users (delete keeps their posts, unattributed), plus totals for views and disk usage. Under the hood: MySQL/InnoDB with self-creating tables and FK cascades, GD thumbnails, MIME-sniffed uploads, a no-PHP-execution uploads folder, CSRF everywhere, honeypots, and session-deduplicated votes and views. 17 files, no framework, no Composer.

1. Create an empty MySQL database (e.g. in cPanel → MySQL Databases) and put its host, name, user and password into the DB_* constants in inc/config.php. All 7 tables create themselves on first load — there is no .sql file to import.

2. Unzip and upload the imgzip/ folder to your server (e.g. yoursite.com/imgzip/).

3. Open index.php?p=login in the browser. On first run it asks you to choose an admin password and prints a ready-made ADMIN_PASSWORD_HASH line — paste it into inc/config.php. Done. Visitors can now register their own accounts from the Sign in page.

Tune inc/config.php to taste: GUEST_UPLOADS (anonymous posting on/off), MODERATION (posts wait for approval), MAX_UPLOAD_MB, MAX_IMAGES_POST, THUMB_W. The uploads/ folder creates itself with an Apache no-PHP-execution rule; on Nginx add the location rule from the README.

Paste this prompt into Claude to build this exact product:

Build a complete, production-quality PHP application called ImgZip: a self-hosted, Imgur-style image sharing community with a cleaner, calmer dark design than the original. Structure it as a small multi-file app — index.php front controller, inc/ (config, helpers, image handling, db, auth, layout) and pages/ (feed, post, upload, meme generator, profile, member auth, admin, admin login), one stylesheet, one vanilla JS file. No framework, no Composer.

Data model (MySQL via PDO, utf8mb4, InnoDB, self-creating tables — no .sql import): users (unique username, password_hash, bio, joined), posts (nullable user_id, unique url token, title, comma tags, views, up, down, status live/pending/hidden), images (post_id, stored + thumbnail filenames, mime, dimensions, size, position — albums), comments (post_id, nullable user_id, author, body), follows (follower_id, followed_id), tag_follows (user_id, tag), reactions (post_id, user_id, emoji — one reaction per user per post). Foreign keys with sensible ON DELETE (CASCADE for content, SET NULL so deleting a user keeps their posts unattributed). Single-quoted SQL literals only.

Members: register with just username + password (regex-validated, honeypot, sleep(1) brute-force delay), profile pages with avatar (colored initial derived from the name), bio, post grid, follower/following counts and a follow button. Users can follow other users AND tags; the feed gets an All / Following tab where Following shows posts by followed users or carrying followed tags. Six emoji reactions (👍😂😮❤️🔥💀) per post — one per user, click again to remove, click another to switch — via a JSON fetch endpoint, next to the classic session-based up/downvotes that also work for guests.

Meme generator page: client-side canvas editor — template strip built from the top non-meme posts, or upload your own image; top/bottom text inputs with a size slider; classic white-fill black-stroke meme lettering (measure and shrink the font to fit rather than using fillText's maxWidth); Download PNG entirely client-side; "Post to feed" renders the canvas to a blob and submits it through the normal upload endpoint tagged "memes".

Uploads & GIFs: drag & drop with previews, up to 10 images per post, MIME-sniffed against a JPG/PNG/GIF/WebP whitelist, random hex filenames, GD feed thumbnails (fixed width, JPEG, white backdrop); animated GIFs are stored untouched and get a GIF badge on feed cards. Uploads folder self-creates with a no-PHP-execution .htaccess.

Feed & post pages: masonry columns, Top/Newest sorting, tag filter with a Follow-#tag button, search, 1.2k-style counts, author line with avatar; post page shows reactions bar, tag chips, a Share & embed box (post link, direct image link, Markdown, HTML, BBCode — each with a copy button), comments (members auto-signed, guests with optional name + honeypot) and a "More viral" sidebar.

Admin: password-hash constant with a first-run hash generator; KPI cards (users, posts + pending, images, comments, total views, disk used); moderation tables for posts (approve/hide/delete — delete unlinks image files), comments, and users (deleting keeps their posts).

Demo mode: a DEMO_MODE constant that blocks every write with a friendly message while keeping everything browsable — auto-signed-in as a seeded sample user so the Following feed and reactions are visible. First run seeds ~12 posts by 5 sample users with follows, tag-follows and reactions spread across them, generating its own images with GD: abstract gradient art, meme-format images with top/bottom captions, and a GIF-mime post.

Security throughout: CSRF on every form and every fetch endpoint, prepared statements, all output escaped, session_regenerate_id on login, per-session view/vote dedupe. Version the asset URLs (?v=APP_VERSION) so upgrades bust caches.

Deliver all files with their paths. Target PHP 8.1+, strict types in the entry point, MIT license.

What happened when we ran it: Claude produced the full 17-file app — 1,983 lines. Functional tests all passed on the first run: registration + login, member upload, follow/unfollow (with self-follow rejected), tag follows, the Following feed showing exactly the followed content, reaction add/switch/remove arithmetic, member comments auto-attributed, admin user deletion keeping posts (FK SET NULL verified in the database), and the meme generator's canvas pipeline. One genuinely fun debugging story: the meme editor appeared to "double-print" its text — after instrumenting the draw code we found the canvas was fine; the default template (the current top post) was itself a seeded meme that already had a caption baked into the pixels. The fix was excluding meme-tagged posts from the template strip.

Note: the download on this page ships with DEMO_MODE = false — no demo restrictions. The prompt is for reproducing (or remixing) the build yourself with your own Claude subscription.