Show HN: Use image hosts for general file hosting

I don't understand the need for this. Hosting 10 GB costs $1 per month on Rackspace Cloud Files and even less on Amazon S3.<p>Secondly, if you use a paid service you don't need to run your files through scripts to upload them, and you don't risk the files being taken down by the image host admins.<p>Also, while hosting non-image files on image file hosts technically might not be illegal, it still essentially is abusing a free service. Do you really want to be that guy?

This is utterly trivial.<p>The s2png program can be written in about 5 minutes by anyone with a good image library in any language. You didn't even write the program yourself, you linked to a Sourceforge project, labeled version 0.01, that hasn't been touched in seven years.<p>And I don't understand: What exactly is the value-add of your Github project? It 7zips the files and handles splitting and merging of large files?<p>And wait...you actually had to use Wine for this? Try apt-cache search libgd and you'll find the (single!) dependency is already packaged (at least on Linux Mint 14, which I presume means these packages also exist on most Ubuntu- or Debian-like systems):<p><pre><code> sudo apt-get install libgd2-xpm-dev libgd2-xpm</code></pre>

I peeked at the code behind s2png, and this doesn't do what you might think from the title. It just copies the data byte-for-byte into the pixels of a PNG image, and when you want the original file back, you need to use the same utility to decode the image.<p>Still a fun little project though.

Wont it cause an error for being an invalid image? Have you tested this?