upload_imgur: Upload an image to imgur.com

In xfun: Supporting Functions for Packages Maintained by 'Yihui Xie'

Upload an image to imgur.com

Description

This function uses the curl package or the system command curl (whichever is available) to upload a image to https://imgur.com.

Usage

upload_imgur(
  file,
  key = env_option("xfun.upload_imgur.key"),
  use_curl = loadable("curl"),
  include_xml = FALSE
)

Arguments

file	Path to the image file to be uploaded.
key	Client ID for Imgur. It can be set via either the global option xfun.upload_imgur.key or the environment variable R_XFUN_UPLOAD_IMGUR_KEY (see env_option()). If neither is set, this uses a client ID registered by Yihui Xie.
use_curl	Whether to use the R package curl to upload the image. If FALSE, the system command curl will be used.
include_xml	Whether to include the XML response in the returned value.

Details

One application is to upload local image files to Imgur when knitting a document with knitr: you can set knitr::opts_knit$set(upload.fun = xfun::upload_imgur), so the output document does not need local image files any more, and it is ready to be published online.

Note that this makes the output self-contained only in the sense that the images are loaded from imgur.com rather than from local files, so the single output file can be shared without the accompanying image files. It does not make the file work offline. If you want a stricter form of self-containedness that does not require an Internet connection (i.e., the images are base64 encoded and embedded in the output), do not use this function, and instead use the self_contained option of the output format (e.g., in the YAML metadata of an R Markdown document).

Value

A character string of the link to the image. If include_xml = TRUE, this string carries an attribute named XML, which is the XML response from Imgur (it will be parsed by xml2 if available). See Imgur API in the references.

Note

Please register your own Imgur application to get your client ID. You can certainly use mine, but this ID is in the public domain and it might reach Imgur's rate limit if too many people are using it in the same time period or someone is trying to upload too many images at once.

Author(s)

Yihui Xie, adapted from the imguR package by Aaron Statham

References

A demo: https://yihui.org/knitr/demo/upload/

Examples

## Not run: 
f = tempfile(fileext = ".png")
png(f); plot(rnorm(100), main = R.version.string); dev.off()

res = imgur_upload(f, include_xml = TRUE)
res  # link to original URL of the image
xfun::attr2(res, "XML")  # all information
if (interactive()) browseURL(res)

# to use your own key
options(xfun.upload_imgur.key = "your imgur key")

## End(Not run)

xfun documentation built on Oct. 16, 2026, 9:06 a.m.