How I harvest images

[jawjahboy]

Early on, as I began to write pages, I learned lots of shortcuts and backdoor entrances to websites. Heck, I was breaking framesets before I even knew what a frameset was. I was shocked and astonished at some of the things I found on some webservers.
Some of you may remember that my first real tool was an access page to create stylized image lines using an app I found on "Cool Text dot com". I had permission from the owner, Brian, but alas many of our webby friends were hot linking through the app, instead of transloading. Brian cut us off and closed the back door I found when his band width went berserk.

In an email, with smileys, I found the link ""Free smileys in your email".
I visited Smiley Central and discovered an app that allowed you to pick among hundreds of smileys and add them to your emails … only problem was sender and recipient were targeted for spam.
Short story version: I noticed numbered images in numbered directories and subdirectories allowing remote linking. The directories were not "open".

I developed a page to view images in subdirectoies:

http://jawjahboy.com/share/smileycentral.html
http://jawjahboy.com/share/smileycentral.txt
Adding to dropdown as I found more subdirectories.

When Smiley Central announced they were discontinuing service I decided to up my game.
http://jawjahboy.com/share/smileycentral6.html
http://jawjahboy.com/share/smileycentral6.txt
Since SC is no longer there, these are useless, but you can add numbers to the inputs and get an idea of how they worked.
Try some big ranges for beginning and ending and see what happens.

Here is a working one I created in about 5 minutes this morning. It is a bit fancier for demonstration purposes. I could have made the thumbnails hyperlinks to view full size.

http://jawjahboy.com/share/wunderground.html

These are simple engines. I will keep my more complicated ones private. But remember, if you don't want folks to see something, don't put it on a webserver.