Corbin Davenport

March 2025 Work Log (Patreon)

Published:

2025-04-02 06:27:44

Imported:

2026-10

Tags:

imageshare photostack the spacebar

Content

Here's everything I worked on during the month of March, exclusively for patrons.

PhotoStack

It's been a while since I worked on PhotoStack! I had to add a privacy policy and make some minor changes for the ongoing security checkup, and I rolled out a few unrelated improvements at the same time.

A lot of the code for importing files in PhotoStack has been overhauled, which fixed a long-standing bug with importing ZIP and Microsoft Office files. You can even select a mix of images, ZIP, and Office files at the same time. For example, you can import a PowerPoint presentation (.pptx), and PhotoStack will extract all the images in the document.

PhotoStack's file format support depends on what your web browser supports, and now the welcome screen in the editor includes a list of allowed file types, seen above. This is part of the new detection code for checking AVIF, JPEG XL, and WebP compatibility, which replaced the third-party Modernizr library. Also, HEIC images are now supported, but only in Safari—no other web browsers have added that yet.

I also updated the navigation bar behavior on smartphone-sized screens. When you open the hamburger menu (☰) in PhotoStack, each button now has its own row and full label text, instead of being squished together with smaller touch targets. The theme dropdown menu is also full-width on these small screens.

Finally, I fixed a bug that was completely breaking PhotoStack in the Safari web browser. PhotoStack uses the Pica library for high-quality image rescaling, which switches between JavaScript, WebAssembly, or Web Workers for processing. The Web Workers option is broken in recent versions of Safari, and I haven't found a reliable way to detect that error, so I just turned it off entirely. PhotoStack once again works in Safari.

I also discovered I can't update PhotoStack to newer versions of Pica, because Pica 7.1 and later are not compatible with the fingerprint detection in Firefox (and possibly other browsers). It's working fine for now, but replacing it is now on the to-do list.

PhotoStack Classic

When I released a big PhotoStack update in 2020 that required Promises and other modern web browser features, I forked the previous codebase as PhotoStack Classic. It's an alternate version that has many of the same features, including watermarks, but still works on older web browsers like Internet Explorer 10. You can export watermarks from PhotoStack and import them in PhotoStack Classic, and vice-versa.

The Bootstrap UI framework used in PhotoStack Classic has been updated to version 4.6, and the jQuery framework has been updated from version 3.5 to 3.7. These are the newest versions that still work on IE 10 and similarly-old browsers. I also removed the code for Dropbox image imports, which has been broken for a while, and brought over some design changes from newer versions of the main PhotoStack.

ImageShare

The ImageShare web app used to upload images to Imgur and ImgBB, but those became increasingly unreliable over time, which is why ImageShare 3.0 switched to self-hosted temporary uploads. I was open to Imgur or ImgBB support returning if someone else wanted to work on it, and developer Nanospearing stepped up to the task!

Nanospearing contributed a pull request that brings back Imgur as an option for uploaded images, and also fixed some unrelated bugs. It's already merged, but even with the new code for handling rate limits, the Imgur API is still blocking the server that hosts the main ImageShare website. I tried setting up a new VPS in a different region, but all Imgur API requests are still failing, even when the same configuration works on my local machine.

I'm hoping there's a workaround somewhere, but at least for now, Imgur support will be limited to self-hosted setups of ImageShare. After some more testing, the Imgur support and other recent changes will be officially released as ImageShare 3.1.