Batch Upload Images to ImageShack using Perl

Someone asked about this so I felt compelled to deliver. The question was: “how to batch upload bunch of images to some free image hosting service?” Here is the answer. I picked ImageShack because you don’t need to register it, and from what I remember they had lax rules about allowed content. Anyway, here is the Perl code. You will need WWW::Mechanize from CPAN. The script takes a list of images to be uploaded as arguments:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use WWW::Mechanize;

# suppress warnings about malformed forms
$SIG{__WARN__} = sub {} ;

my $url = "http://www.imageshack.us/";

my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();

foreach (@ARGV)
{
    $mech->get($url);

    $mech->form_number(2);
    $mech->field('fileupload' => $_);
    $mech->submit();

    # follow the link to see the image
    $mech->follow_link( text => 'Show', n => 1 );
    my @im = $mech->images();

    # display the URL of the uploaded image
    print $im[0]->url() . "\n";
}

To run it just do something like:

upload.pl ~/img/image1.jpg ~/img/image2.jpg

Alternatively to upload all the files in the current directory you can do:

ls | xargs | upload.pl

The output of the script are the URL’s of the uploaded images, appearing in order in which you specify them in arguments – this way you don’t loose track of your images.

One thing to watch for is the form that you specify in the line:

 $mech->form_number(2);

When I started writing this script, I was using 1 instead of 2 and it was working fine. Then I went to eat something, and when I came back, it no longer worked. Not sure what happened, but looking at the amount of javascript on imageshack website it’s possible that they sometimes move around the search box on the page – possibly to prevent exactly what I’m showing you here. :)

Enjoy.

[tags]imageshack, batch upload, image upload, perl, WWW::Mechanize, programming[/tags]