# Is there a way to outsource image uploads? **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [April 15, 2008, 6:33pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/is-there-a-way-to-outsource-image-uploads/134859 "2008-04-15T18:33:57Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![vince](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/v/b5e925/32.png) [@vince](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/vince)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2008, 6:33pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/is-there-a-way-to-outsource-image-uploads/134859/1 "2008-04-15T18:33:57Z")
I’m trying to keep my rails app lean and mean and want to avoid (if possible) dealing with image uploads, thumbnail generation, running RMagick etc. I was excited about Amazon letting you upload files directly from the browser to your S3 bucket ([http://doc.s3.amazonaws.com/proposals/](http://doc.s3.amazonaws.com/proposals/) post.html) but I couldn’t figure out how to generate thumbnails - has anyone figured this out? Nirvanix ([http://www.nirvanix.com](http://www.nirvanix.com)) also supports uploading images directly AND thumbnail generation but I wasn’t able to find documentation on how to integrate with Rails… If anyone has ideas on this please share 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![vince](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/v/b5e925/32.png) [@vince](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/vince)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2008, 7:27pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/is-there-a-way-to-outsource-image-uploads/134859/2 "2008-04-15T19:27:21Z")
I haven’t heard that Amazon has a service to generate thumbnails. I use RMagick. It was pretty easy to write a ruby script that read the specified image files, loaded an image, generated the thumbnail, and wrote it out into the file system under a new name. I used the RMagick and ActiveRecord API’s and at that point didn’t have any of this code in a Rails app. Now I do. My needs were to read a list of image file names from the database, and to update the database with the new names of the thumbnail image files. Otherwise I wouldn’t have needed to use ActiveRecord at all. F ---
**Author:** ![vince](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/v/b5e925/32.png) [@vince](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/vince)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2008, 9:26pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/is-there-a-way-to-outsource-image-uploads/134859/3 "2008-04-15T21:26:30Z")
You can try using picasa (they have an api, but I can’t find a rails module for it) or flickr as a backend image store, that might work. In general, though, you really should be handling that stuff, if only because you need to control the thumbnail size for good layouts. You are also probably going to want to add in watermarking/site captioning and other things as your site progresses. If you really really want to offload this, check this out: [http://www.aurigma.com/](http://www.aurigma.com/). This tool allows you to offload all the CPU costs to the client, and it delivers the uploaded data to your server for further processing. It’s an activex/java hybrid (depending on the browser/OS) that handles a lot of this for you, and feels less like a web form and more like an application (because, in reality, it is ;). You just need to daemonize some ruby process to handle the incoming data. ---
**Author:** ![vince](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/v/b5e925/32.png) [@vince](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/vince)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2008, 11:12pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/is-there-a-way-to-outsource-image-uploads/134859/4 "2008-04-15T23:12:27Z")
this might help. > **[Parse Picasa XML with Rails](https://www.hackerdude.com/2006/02/27/parse-picasa-xml-with-rails/)** > > Here’s a helper I just wrote for a site of mine. I use it with my picasa XML albums to generate the appropriate links for Lokesh Dhakar’s lightbox image viewer trick. You can change it … ---
**Author:** ![vince](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/v/b5e925/32.png) [@vince](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/vince)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2008, 11:43pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/is-there-a-way-to-outsource-image-uploads/134859/5 "2008-04-15T23:43:00Z")
Thanks for the responses. I checked out [aurigma.com](http://aurigma.com) but I was put off by the java applet that took a while to load plus the authorization message. They also seem more geared towards users who need to manipulate their images - we just need basic image storage and their thumbnails. Using picasa or flickr sounds like a good idea, but I’m not sure so sure if it’s a good solution for a site with many users who will each upload their own pictures (both in terms of cost structure and limiting usage to individual users). But I could be wrong about this since I haven’t dug too deep into their APIs. Any other thoughts? 🙂 We’re leaning towards nirvanix… but the lack of rails or ruby specific documentation is discouraging. On Apr 15, 5:11 pm, “Elad M. - [Creopolis.com](http://Creopolis.com)” [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid)