Free Chevereto Alternative — Self-Hosted Image Hosting PHP Script (PixelZip)

PixelZip is a complete, self-hosted image hosting platform — the software behind sites like Imgur or Chevereto-powered galleries — that you install on your own server in two minutes. Multi-user accounts, drag-and-drop uploads, albums with password protection, a moderation queue, watermarking, IP bans, flood protection, a ShareX-ready API and S3 storage: everything Chevereto locks behind its Lite ($10/month) and Pro ($99/year) subscriptions, shipped free and MIT-licensed. No license key, no phone-home, no locked settings.

Why we built it: Chevereto is the de-facto standard for self-hosted image hosting — and while a free edition is available on GitHub, the features self-hosters actually need (upload moderation, watermarks, IP banning, spam protection, social features) are reserved for paid tiers. PixelZip's brief was simple: build the whole thing, give it away.

Uploading, the way it should work. Drop files anywhere on the upload page, paste straight from the clipboard, browse, or fetch from a URL. Files bigger than the server's upload_max_filesize still work — the uploader slices them into 2 MB chunks and the server reassembles them. Guests can upload without an account (with their own size limit and an optional auto-delete policy), duplicates are caught by content hash, and every upload can self-destruct after 5 minutes to 1 month. JPG, PNG, GIF (animations preserved untouched), WebP, AVIF and BMP are supported, with three sizes generated per image: square thumbnail, medium, and the untouched original.

Protection that's usually paywalled: a real moderation queue (hold everything, or guests only), adaptive PNG watermarking with per-group rules, per-IP flood limits for uploads, albums, signups and logins, IP bans with expiry and a custom message, a stop-word filter covering titles, filenames, usernames and bios, optional Cloudflare Turnstile on signup, NSFW flagging with viewer-side blur, EXIF stripping by default, and content-vs-extension verification so a PHP file in a .jpg coat never gets through. Uploads land in a directory where script execution is disabled — defense in depth.

For power users: every member gets an API key — upload with one curl line, or download the ready-made ShareX config (.sxcu) from account settings and screenshot-to-URL in one keypress. Embed codes (direct link, HTML, Markdown, BBCode) sit one click away on every image. Storage is pluggable: local disk out of the box, plus any S3-compatible bucket (AWS, Wasabi, Backblaze B2, DigitalOcean Spaces, MinIO) added from the admin panel with a built-in connection test — native Signature V4 over cURL, no SDK, no Composer.

And an admin panel that covers everything: dashboard with live stats and runtime checks, a content manager searchable by title or ip:, user roles, categories, custom HTML pages, 8 banner/ad slots, theme controls (dark/light, accent color, custom CSS/JS, analytics), SMTP settings with a test-mail button. Every product setting is editable in the panel — you never touch a config file after install.

Feature	PixelZip	Chevereto
Price	Free forever (MIT)	Free (GitHub) · Lite $10/mo · Pro $99/yr
License key / phone-home	None	License key, update checks
Free edition	This is the only edition	Free version available (GitHub)
Upload moderation queue	Included	Lite ($10/mo)
Watermarking	Included (adaptive, per-group)	Lite ($10/mo)
Likes & follows	Included	Lite ($10/mo)
IP bans	Included (expiry + custom message)	Pro ($99/yr)
Flood protection	Included (per-action limits)	Pro ($99/yr)
Stop words	Included	Pro ($99/yr)
Banner / ad manager	Included (8 slots)	Pro ($99/yr)
S3-compatible storage	Included (native SigV4, no SDK)	All editions
Chunked uploads	Included (2 MB parts)	Included
ShareX + API	Included (.sxcu one click)	Included
Password-protected albums	Included (+ sub-albums)	Included
OAuth login providers	Not in 1.0	Pro ($99/yr)
Video uploads	Not in 1.0 (images only)	Included
Multi-language UI	English only in 1.0	30+ languages

1. Upload everything to your web root or any subfolder and create a MySQL database.

2. Open install.php in your browser, fill in the database + admin form, click Install. The installer checks your PHP extensions first and locks itself once an admin exists.

3. Delete install.php.

4. Add the housekeeping cron (expired uploads, cleanup): */15 * * * * php /path/to/pixelzip/cron.php — or call cron.php?key=YOUR_KEY from your host's cron panel.

5. Everything else — uploads, watermark, moderation, storage, SMTP, theme — is configured from the admin panel.

The brief: "Research everything Chevereto does, then build the whole feature set — with a design that's more usable, more modern, and doesn't smell AI-generated." The research pass came first: Chevereto's full feature page, edition comparison docs and pricing were mapped into an inventory, which doubled as the build checklist — and as the pricing argument (moderation and watermarks are Lite, $10/mo; IP bans, flood protection, stop words, OAuth and non-S3 storage are Pro, $99/yr).

Architecture: plain PHP 8.1, one mini-framework file (bootstrap: settings cache, auth, CSRF, encoded IDs, flood/ban/stop-word guards), a GD pipeline class, a storage abstraction with native S3 SigV4 over cURL (no SDK), and a single JSON API that serves both the browser uploader (session + CSRF header) and ShareX/scripts (X-API-Key). Image IDs are XOR-masked per install before base-58 encoding, so public URLs are short and non-enumerable.

The design: a "darkroom" theme — near-black charcoal, one signal-orange accent, Bricolage Grotesque display type, JetBrains Mono for numbers, a dashed film-strip marquee of fresh uploads on the homepage, and a masonry grid with hover metadata. No purple gradients, no glassmorphism cards, no emoji headers.

Adversarial pass (fix → proof):
- A PHP payload wearing a .jpg name is rejected by getimagesize; a crafted GIF89a+PHP polyglot passes the header sniff but dies in GD decode; and because *animated* GIFs are copied verbatim (GD would flatten them), the uploads directory ships with script execution disabled — tested all three.
- Chevereto's duplicate rule (same file + same IP, 24h) blocked two different members behind the same NAT in testing. PixelZip's rule became: per-account for members, per-IP only for guests.
- Chunked uploads enforce the size limit on every chunk, so the limit can't be bypassed by slicing a big file — verified with a 21 MB file against a 20 MB cap (rejected at the chunk where it crossed).
- URL fetch resolves the hostname first and refuses private/reserved ranges (SSRF), verified against the server's own loopback config file.
- Flood limits verified live (limit 2/min → third upload rejected), IP ban returns the custom message on every route, the moderation queue keeps pending images visible only to their uploader, and a session-only guest can delete their own upload but nobody else's.

Result: 33 files, 4,125 lines, tested end-to-end on a live rig — install → upload (single, chunked, URL, paste) → variants → albums with password gates → likes/follows/notifications → moderation cycle → cron expiry sweep → watermark pixels verified in the output JPEG.

Design revision (v1.0, same day): the first theme leaned on the usual AI-landing crutches — orange accent everywhere, radial glow, // mono kicker, bold grotesque headline. It was rebuilt as a "quiet gallery": monochrome UI where the photos are the only color, Newsreader editorial serif with an italic turn in the headline, white primary buttons, hairline dividers. Two bugs surfaced on the way: square-cropped thumbnails inside original-ratio masonry boxes left dead space under every card (thumbnails now keep their aspect ratio), and Cloudflare kept serving the old stylesheet because assets were versioned with a static constant — cache-busting now uses filemtime. The demo gallery was reseeded with real photography (Unsplash via Picsum, 18 photos), and the demo bar gained a one-click "Browse the admin panel" entry.