I, too, am toying with image uploads… and have got to the stage where
I can now both save them to DB and resize them using RMagick…
I’m intrigued though by what seems the standard practice in Rails of
first saving the image to the DB as a blob. Is this required? And what
are the advantages of doing so? Or is it part of having an image
“model”?
And what about the recieved wisdom on where to store the images?
Ideally, I’d like them somewhere in the /public/images… heirarchy
where they can be accessed from the front end. Is that the right place?
But in that case, I’m having problems accessing them from my upload form
(or rather, show.rhtml). If I do something like:
That sounds like file_column. I was playing with that yesterday. It
looks in “picture/29” because the id for the image’s entry in the
database is “29”. The plugin saves each file in a separate folder
because it doesn’t rename the files and wants to avoid overwriting a
file with the same name. I didn’t like that much either.
Now if I can just get Flex_image installed without fryig WEBrick…
The main advantages of storing images in database for me is that:
images are treated the same way as any other data
no need to juggle with file system operations (especially deleting
image files from filesystem)
very easy to move and backup data (just backup database, and not
database plus images directory)
I personally use FlexImage, which in turn relies on RMagick, which in
turn requires either GraphicsMagick or ImageMagick to be installed,
which in turn… But once you build the whole chain at least once,
this is actually the easiest setup I have ever used.
Also, kind of off-topic, but I’ve heard you’re better of as Mongrel as
a web-server, especially during the development period. There were
stories when Webrick didn’t reload changed files and stuff like that…
Myself, I use Mongrel on both development (plain mongrel) and
production (mongrel cluster) systems.
Yes, sounds like you’re right. And a quick search for file_column
returns a wealth of info.
It looks in “picture/29” because the id for the image’s entry in the
database is “29”. The plugin saves each file in a separate folder
because it doesn’t rename the files and wants to avoid overwriting a
file with the same name.
Actually, that’s fine for me.
Now if I can just get Flex_image installed without fryig WEBrick…
Good luck!
You’re on Mac OSX right? Incidentally, I installed RMagick last week
following this:
It worked fine. The only hiccup I had was on the actual RMagick
installation - where I found I had to specify the PATH before it would
work ( it had installed ImageMagick in a dir called /opt). I also had to
edit my bashrc file. But once I’d done that, it worked fine. It did take
a couple of hours though.
Probably MacD will be able to help you better… but this is what I was
doing. (Basically I was just following one of the recipes in Chad
Fowler’s very worthwhile “Rails Recipes” book). I simply put the
following code into the view:
<% @images.each_with_index do |image,index| %>
<%= thumbnail image %>
<% if (index + 1) % 5 == 0 %> <% end %>
<% end %>
<% end %>
It worked fine - but for some reason only returned the top part of the
image - and obfuscating the lower. The reason for which I haven’t yet
got to the bottom of - maybe MacD or someone else will know
I may have a question or two for you once I get to that bashrc file.
Sure. All it really does is set your path - to save you having to do
something like this:
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin
every time you run a command.
You can write it directly into a (hidden) file called just .bashrc in
your home directory. To see if you’ve got that file already open a shell
and type:
ls -a
If you’ve got TextMate (which most Rails folks seem to use) and you’ve
set the TextMate command (Can’t remember the details of where to put
this - somewhere in /usr - Google around for the exact details) you can
just do:
mate .bashrc
in your shell and it will open the file for you to edit.
This may be the problem with not having Darwin Ports. Maybe it can’t
find the PATH. I seem to remember I ran into problems here
sudo port -d selfupdate
for exactly this reason. Try and find where it added the command “port”
This may be the problem with not having Darwin Ports. Maybe it can’t
find the PATH. I seem to remember I ran into problems here
sudo port -d selfupdate
for exactly this reason. Try and find where it added the command “port”
then add that to your PATH.
That’s exactly it. I restarted and nothing changed, so I fumed and
snorted for a good twenty minutes before having one of those “Eureka”
moments. Five minutes later, it was running perfectly.
I have a question about storing images directly in the database. Maybe
you can help me, MacD. I, too, thought this was a better idea, but never
figured out how to get them out. How do you trick the user’s browser
into rendering a file that doesn’t actually exist on the server?
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But once you build the whole chain at least once,