Awesome

Bart's Imgur uploader bash script

By Bart Nagel bart@tremby.net
Improvements by Tino Sino robottinosino@gmail.com
Other contributions from the Github community

Purpose

Upload images to Imgur via a small bash script.

History

This is the repository for the Bash script which has been found on Imgur's tools page since way back in 2009, and now on their new tools page.

I received infrequent but steady emails over the years with thanks and suggestions for improvements. A Google search shows the script has been reused and forked many times over the years. About time this had its own Git repository, so maybe the improvements can find their way back to the source.

Requirements

curl

Optional

xsel, xclip, pbcopy (Mac), or clip (Windows) to automatically put the URLs on the X selection or clipboard for easy pasting

Instructions

Put it somewhere in your path and maybe rename it
```
 mv imgur.sh ~/bin/imgur
```
Or you could make a symlink instead.
Make it executable
```
 chmod +x ~/bin/imgur
```
Optional, since I've provided a client ID: add your client id to the top of the script, replacing the provided one, or set it as the IMGUR_CLIENT_ID environment variable

Uploading images

Single image

  imgur images/hilarious/manfallingover.jpg

Single image from a URL
```
  imgur https://example.com/egg.png
```

Multiple images

  imgur images/delicious/cake.png https://example.com/exciting/bungeejump.jpg

Directly from a screenshot
```
  import png:- | imgur
```
Note that the import command above is from Imagemagick, and will await a selection being made on screen.

The new URLs will be displayed (and the delete page URLs will be displayed on stderr). If you have xsel or xclip, the URLs will also be put on the primary X selection, which you can then usually paste with a middle click. If you have pbcopy (standard on Mac) or clip (standard on Windows), the URLs will be put on the clipboard.

If no filename is given, or if - is given as one of the arguments, an image is read from standard input.

Rate limits

There are some rate limits with the API. The daily upload limit is shared by everyone using the same client ID, so if you're using the provided one and start to get errors, you might consider using your own client ID.

Configuring your clipboard program

You can configure the clipboard program by providing options for it.

An example use case is if you're using xsel or xclip and would rather user the clipboard than the primary selection.

See the code for the environment variable names, but for the xsel example above, you'd set the environment variable IMGUR_XSEL_OPTIONS to -b:

IMGUR_XSEL_OPTIONS=-b imgur ...

You can make this environment variable persistent; do a web search if you don't know how.