Subir-Fotos.com (v1)

My first photo uploading website

About the project

Creation date: 2006
Technologies: PHP + HTML

This was the first version of Subir-Fotos.com ("upload-photos.com" in English), a website I created in 2006, when I was fifteen, to allow users to upload pictures and share them online (back then, image hosting services were not as common as they are today, so there was a real need for this kind of service). This was also my first PHP website!

This initial version was quite simple: you would just upload a picture and get some URLs: a direct link to it, an HTML link to embed it, and a BBCode link for forums. There was no user registration, no account management, and no way to organise your pictures. It was just a straightforward upload-and-share service.

Through a combination of thoughtful SEO and pure luck, for more than one year this site would appear as the first result in Google for the search "subir fotos" ("upload pictures", in English), which brought many visitors and a good amount of revenue.

Due to the success of the site, I eventually created a V2 the following year, which added user accounts and the ability to manage your pictures.

How it looked

This is a screenshot that shows how the website looked. You can click on it to see the full image:

Where it came from

Regarding the core functionality, which was the ability to upload and share photos, it came from a random "script" I downloaded from some forum, if memory serves me right. But the appearance and all the extras were 100% my own doing, for better or worse (looking at it, mostly for worse).

Interestingly, this website looked very similar to the website I made for a school project – at the time, I was "the kid who knew how to make websites", so I was tasked with creating one for a fake travel company we set up as part of a (business?) class:

I do remember "copying" myself here, but I cannot figure out which one of the designs was first, so I guess this chicken-and-egg mystery will forever remain unsolved.