PAGE 1 of 1 :

SITE INFORMATION (more than you need to know)

This gallery depends heavily on JavaScript for functionality. You can browse without JS but I wouldn't recommend it.
Tip: Use your keyboard to navigate the images faster.

W / A / S / D are the most important keys.
Click here for all keyboard shortcuts.
Tip: Make your browser window thin to see tall images better when they are scaled.
There is no global search yet (I will make one if the site increases in popularity) however you can search the whole current category by loading its index page and then pressing CTRL+F to use your browser's built-in page search.
All these images are not handpicked by me, a lot has been sent to me and some has been aquired in batch. That said you understand I haven't even seen half of them, if you encounter anything that really shouldn't be there please tell me.
There are some duplicate images even though I try to have as few of them as possible (using apps and also using my eyes). Impossible to catch them all though. Dupes in different root categories are more OK than those in the same category tree.
A low quality version of an image is created if the image has a file size of over 500 KiB and if it's not animated. This is to get the image over to you faster, and to not waste bandwidth on those images you won't be saving.
A low quality version is always below 500 KiB and always at least 300 KiB smaller than the original image (a very few amount of huge images might still be larger than 500 KiB though).
If a image has a green background/border when viewed it means that it is the original image. If the color is red it means that the image is a low quality version. The brighter the red color is the less quality the image has compared to the original, if it is hinting towards white it has the lowest quality and may not be below 500 KiB in size. There are four different intensities of red.
If a image failed to have a thumbnail generated it will have a dummy thumbnail consisting of a black X on a white background (the thumbnail ratio is mostly still correct however). This can happen if something is fishy with the image (like it's broken (but still is a image) or contain weird extra data).
Thumbnails have different border colors depending on how many percent of the original image's dimensions it has (the color show how big the real image is relative to the thumbnail).

A) Black = 90%-100% (near or exactly the same size)
B) Green = 55%-90%
C) Yellow = 20%-55%
D) Blue = 10%-20%
E) Purple = 0%-10% (huge image)
A thumbnail can be max 300x300 pixels. Even if a image's dimensions are below that it will still have a thumbnail generated for it (because in most cases the file size will still be smaller + a thumbnail must by site-rule always be a JPEG, but of course because of this in some few rare cases the thumbnail will have a larger file size than the original image).

Below the thumbnails the image name is displayed along with extra information, for example:

"1920x1200 3.21MiB R1.6 Q1 Td15.6"

1920x1200 = Image dimensions.
3.21MiB = File size.
R1.6 = Image ratio (width/height).
Q1 = Quality of low quality (0 = no low quality version, 1 = best low quality, 7 = worst low quality).
Td15.6 = Thumbnail has 15.6% of the original image's dimensions (the letter responds to the thumbnail's border color, can be a, b, c, d or e ("d" means blue)).

These things are easy to search for in a category index by using CTRL+F.

From the start I didn't intend the system to manage files with unicode characters in their names, but I added some support for them anyway by converting between charsets. The file name won't look good when viewing an image but at least the image will be displayed.
The lists and index page will show all file names correctly, even if they have unicode characters in them. If you want the correct unicode filename of the image you are viewing you can look it up below its thumbnail (utilize the keyboard shortcut "F" to go to its position in the category list).
Some browsers may be confused and try to show the pages of this gallery in the wrong charset encoding. This is incorrect behaviour, make sure you set the charset to be used as ISO-8859-1 if it is not done automatically.
You may get the error page "Bad Request" when you try to display some images, this is because the unicode file name of a image translated to some strange characters which are blocked by the web server. It's a very rare occurance that happens only when you try to view a image with some specific unicode characters in them. In the future this safeguard of the web server may be turned off, for now however its a (small) issue. At least you can't even see the thumbnail of these files so you won't know what you are missing. =P
To avoid unneccessary gets, and to speed things up, all content that you download from the site is cached locally by your browser for 15 days. If you have disabled caching, consider enabling it. Also, because of the cache you will have to manually check for updates of the gallery by pressing F5 on this page and checking if the total image count has changed (clear cache if it has). I expect the gallery to update very seldom though so don't worry.
Some browser(s) may try to save the images as bitmaps (.bmp files), I don't know why this happens really but it looks like it has something to do with the characters in the file name? It's a mystery... There shouldn't be a problem in most browsers, however if it does happen you can always just grab the image from the browser cache or retrieve it in some other fashion.
In order to view many images you will have to enter a captcha every now and then. This is in order to prevent robots to leech the whole site and drain all bandwidth. The site wasn't created to be drained, it was created to be enjoyed. Each captcha you submit will earn you 100-250 more images before a new captcha is required, hopefully this is an amount that makes it not too annoying for humans.
To prevent hot linking (aka direct linking) each image link is locked to your IP address and only valid for a short period of time. I'd be very happy if you send links to images to your friends, but please don't link to the image itself because it won't work. Use the URL that's in your browsers address bar instead (the one that ends with .htm/.HTM).
MZ Images does not watermark or tag its images in any way. Sure I could do it and increase the amount of visitors over time, but doing so would give the image decreased media quality or increased file size. And worst of all I would take credit for someone else's work; watermarking something would imply that I had something to do with making it. That's why I deem people that tag/watermark other people's work the scum of the Internet. "Stealing" (copying) is fine by me, that's how the web works (lots of people take my creations too and put them up here and there), but you should never ever touch the contents of it.
The JavaScript has been tested and deemed working in the following browsers: Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox, Chrome. This was done before the site came online, late December 2009. "MZ" in the site name "MZ Images" is short for my nick name "MackanZoor" by the way.

This gallery is built using the following programming languages:

C/C++ - An ISAPI extension runs the whole site. This delivers content extremely fast; it fetches static files, generates pages, manages captchas and pretty much everything else. It's what operating systems are written in so the performance is pretty much as good as it can get.

Java - Goes through all the images, making sure they have thumbnails, validating them, creating list pages/indexes... refreshes the entire gallery.

JavaScript - By using client-side script I'm able to take a load off the server when pages need to be generated dynamically. And through JS a lot of functionality can be added to the site.

HTML/CSS - Basic stuff to display web pages and making them look a little better.

That's all, hopefully you will enjoy browsing through the images.
Have fun!