Fotopic runs on a cluster of Linux and Sun boxes, utilising Perl, PHP, and various other custom-written C binaries. Our operating system of choice is Slackware Linux, which we find is flexible and allows us to do quite a few things other Linux distributions don't ;)

Image and video manipulation is done on-the-fly dependent on connection speed and browser, and users may customise their galleries and collections through use of the My.Fotopic interface. Optimisation is carried out automatically for most handheld devices such as the Compaq iPaq, Palm, Handspring, Nokia 9110 and 9210, Symbian mobile devices, and handhelds such as the SPV. We are constantly adding to our knowledgebase of digital photography to make it easier for you to publish your photographs.

The application server cluster is comprised of around 40 Intel servers, and the core database is powered by a giant RAID system, using the MySQL v4.1 database software. Each server is named after a character from the Cartoon Network television series The PowerPuff Girls, and lovingly monitored day and night by the technical team.

Our fileservers are RAID5, using hotswap SATA drives with warm spare and cold spare. We back up the image archive frequently (for internal use) and store backup drives at a separate location.

Servers are physically located in Leeds. Bandwidth is provided by Kingston Communications. We pull around 25Mbits/s, and Kingston more than adequately provide for this!

Please don't ask for copies of the Fotopic engine to run on your own servers - it isn't freely available. You can interface your own programs to Fotopic though using our Fotopic Toolkit API, which runs via XML and HTTP POST. We also make some of our software public through our software.fotopic.net website.

If you are a company seeking to utilise the Fotopic engine for your own company, we now offer white-label services please click here to find out more.