Testing Free Host with FTP - Redirected to Another Site - Way to Harm User's Computer?

I was testing a free account from https://byet.host/. I’d use GS’s built-in hosting, but it resizes images too small. EPS’s display limit is 1600 pixels wide. My camera takes images up to 5,184 thus most cropped images are bigger than either of these thus I need a server with ftp.

When I click “Test Image” button under the GS preferences the default browser (FireFox) does not show the standard GS test image in the browser window that opens. Instead it briefly shows a url that’s too fast too see, then redirects to a second page that’s also too fast too see, and then a 3rd page which is filled with a bunch of Chinese ads which are sometimes filled with women “wearing less clothing than usual”.

With the first stage of the Start Assistant I able to see the folders on the server, including the default GS image that would be uploaded using the “Test Settings” button; however, the Start Assistant will not complete and says there was an error that occurred while downloading the test image.

After talking with the IT department at the host they think that GS is being blocked as a bot with free account I am using and suspect that this would not happen with a paid account. What appears to be happening is that because the request to the specific file on their server was blocked as coming from a bot their server instead returned a default web page url that was then was redirected twice. I seem to have confirm this by manually pasting the actual url of default GS test image into the browser (it appears) and then changing the url by one letter to a nonexisting file - it defaults to the same redirected url as before. The host’s choice of a default web page is not professional to say the least.

I am curious if this could not be used by someone with bad intentions to use GS to open a web page with code that would harm the user’s computer? I am not sure if anything bad was happening here; however, this might be a security issue as the redirected pages could have easily contained harmful code. I ran a virus checker to make sure and found nothing. I am not sure if GS could place some safeguard in place but I thought I just let you know in case this might be a problem.

My recommendation would be to not use free image hosting services. Since they have to make money at some point, the mostly try to sneak in HTML pages loaded with dubious adds when asked to provide an previously uploaded images. This usually breaks how GarageSale embeds

Also it sounds, as if you got the HTML path in GarageSale configured wrong, if you don’t even get to see the uploaded test image.

Concerning the security you should be on the safe site if you keep your internet browser always updated and don’t click or install anything offered on the web page. On the other hand, if you use such services for your images, you might risk the security of people viewing our images with outdated browsers or missing security updates.

How you thought about uploading images to DropBox and using GarageSale’s URL-image feature to embedded very large images?

@ilja Is it really possible to use dropbox to insert image in description without copying and pasting the link every time? If yes, how, please??

No, it would still be a manual process for every images.

Ah ok ok, never mind. Thank you

We could increase the maximum image size for our “Paid Image Hosting” service to about 4000x3000? Would that help?

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Hello @ilja ,
well, it would be undoubtedly very very important!! We talked about a similar matter here

Continuing the discussion from Image Links Considered Active Content & Will Not Work:

Some months ago we discussed that GS speed may be slow because of large number of photos included in descriptions. do you think that larger size could make it slower? Anyway, it would be super!!

This is actually a paid host which offers a free account to get you started. I sent a screen shot of the settings to host firm’s IT department and they said it was correct. They said it was likely due to GS being blocked as a bot because its their free service and they provided a link where I could try their paid service free for 1 month to test if this was the reason. I’ve not done that yet.

Since GS was blocked as a bot it was sent a default url which I guess they are using as a sort of 404 page when an incorrect url is made to their servers. I think I confirmed this by entering their main url and then entering a random nonexisting image name - the browser was taken to this same page. The urls of the embedded images have no ads displayed - they work fine.

“We could increase the maximum image size for our “Paid Image Hosting” service to about 4000x3000? Would that help?”

My camera takes images which are 5,184 x 3,456 and its several years old and not a full frame camera. Most images are cropped to a smaller size; however, many of those are bigger than 4,000 on one side in my last batch of 261 images.

Of course it will be slower, as resizing and creating thumbnails takes longer for larger images. Make sure you are using a decent Mac.

Thanks for the feedback.

I see. We’ll do a little math to figure if we have sufficient disk space in our servers to offer that size.

What do you mean with decent :cry: ?

Welcome!

@ilja I was thinking… would GS go faster if I use ftp or similar solutions?

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