Uploading Photos - HowTo with Rails 3 ---- Which Gem?, S3?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi,

Here's what I'm trying to achieve: 1. Allow users to upload a photo for their profile 2. Allow users to upload photos as blog posts

That being said, here's what I need your expert opinion on: 1. S3, is this still the best choice? Any better easier, Rails3 like alternatives? Or should I go with S3 2. What Rails 3 Gem supports this best? Allowing me to upload photos to S3 and assign some type of referenceID throughout the app for USERS & BlogPostings.

Eager to hear your suggestions.

2

Paperclip makes this desperately easy, even the S3 part. It's a simple configuration change and your files will be saved in S3 versus local storage.

Files are saved as attributes of another model record, so you don't have a separate Image model, you have post_image and user_image, and Paperclip takes care of all the dependencies for you. If you wanted to have multiple pictures per blog post, then you might need a separate model for that, with belongs_to :post and post has_many :photos and Paperclip added to your Photo model as photo_image or something like that.

Walter

3

Thanks Walter for the recommendation. I also will need to upload other non-image file types to S3. Do you recommend Paperclip for that as well?

4

Paperclip can upload anything you can stuff in a file upload control. I've used it for PDF, Word, zip, pretty much anything.

Walter