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Comment by user24 | Hacker News Reader

How strange. Until last month, I was running gifexplode.com, a site where you could share 'exploded' gifs - i.e. it took an animated gif and stepped over it frame-by-frame. I took the service offline last month because people were using it to store porn. I had tried finding a client-side solution in vain. The long-term plan for gifexplode was to introduce a player just like this!

Soon as I get a chance, I think I'll relaunch gifexplode with your viewer.

Here's the blog post about how gifexplode was born, it's quite an interesting story: http://www.puremango.co.uk/2009/08/gifexplode-community-powe...

edit: Hmm, using XHR to fetch the gif will give me cross-domain issues unless I first mirror the image on my server. Anyone know of a way around that?

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This was meant as a proof-of-concept and has several big inefficiencies that could be fixed pretty easily if someone was actually going to use it for something. The UI could also be improved, and I think at least IE9 could be reasonably easy to support (though I haven't tried).

I was using XHR because an important constraint was to do everything client-side, and there's no other way that I could find to get the raw image data. If you have server-side support, though, a lot of things can be made much simpler. Is there a reason not to proxy, like crux_ suggested?

Instead of mirroring, you could proxy. (Solves "storage"/"mirroring" issue; doesn't solve "nasty stuff served up through your server" issue.)

In general, though, there's no way around it, except of course by restructuring gifexplode as a bookmarklet or convincing image host(s) to partner with you:

They can then include the code on the pages they serve up themselves, allow XHR requests via HTML5 or flash mechanisms, or give you base64 data smuggled into a JSONP.

Thanks, yeah I think proxying is the best solution. I'm still not sure if that's a route I want to go down though... The nasty stuff served through my server is what I want to avoid. Gifexplode became quite popular on 4chan you see...

You may be interested in this, http://www.patrick-wied.at/static/nudejs/. It might help prevent users from uploading porn. Found it through this HN post, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2401083

Wouldn't you be able to create an image tag dynamically and then use that? I'm not sure if you can get a callback when the image is loaded though.

No; calling getImageData on an image tag with an external src will fail with a cross domain warning :(

You can set up an onload handler on an image though, yeah.

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