Search for a client image upload service

General Web Design
1

I am looking for a solution to upload images from clients via a web page and wondered if anyone had some creative ideas how to do this.

I want to avoid attaching images to emails because adding restrictions to the number of images and sizes of images may put customers off and may stop the clients email from working.

I also want to avoid uploading images to a web server because the accumulating images will need to be regularly removed to stop the web space filling up.

Ideally something like a personal file sharing service such as Droplr, but in reverse, so that anyone can upload files to a service which creates a link to the files which are deleted after a week.

1 Like
2

PhpJ do a form script which has an upload facility. Once they upload the admin get an email with a link to the file. They can also log in and retrieve all uploads via the dashboard. Not sure in time sensitive deletions but that should be easy to manage server side with a cron job.

I use this form for a pharmacist client who has customers apply for online prescriptions, they need to upload their doctors scripts using the form. Works well.

Or, of course, @Jannis Repository.

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Thanks. These solutions however, upload to the server which Iā€™m trying to avoid. Otherwise I would use Repository which is ideal.

For this application landlords could for example be uploading 10 properties each with 10 x 5Mb images adding up to 500Mb. The server storage could soon fill up and needs to be cleared out once the images are downloaded.

4

Could you not just use a file transfer service like: https://wetransfer.com/

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Wetransfer is brilliant except it requires setting up at the senders end, by the senders, which will be too much for some. Iā€™m looking for something like a Wereceive service that is setup and paid for by the receiver of the files and exists as a drop zone on the receiverā€™s web page.

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Iā€™m not familiar with the service you mention, but if you donā€™t want the images emailed, and you donā€™t want them stored on a server, where are they going to be kept between upload and download?

Sorry if Iā€™ve misunderstood your initial post, Iā€™m replying inbetween laying paving slabs.

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They would ideally be kept on the service server, paid for by operator of the web site who wants to receive files from visitors to their web site.

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Gotcha. So really your looking for a Dropbox type service that has a website widget to facilitate drag and drop uploading?

Or, a script or summit that can be stuck on a web page that connects to said service?

I donā€™t know of anything like that, but my first port of call would be to find something that will allow remote adding of files to an AWS bucket. Then work back from there.

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9

This open source solution might do it

Have you had a look at https://nextcloud.com

intro video here to show some of what it can do https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQjN5Fs5QSz1loJqLb5bkew

I got told about it couple of weeks ago and must get around to trying it myself

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Thatā€™s also self hosted on your own server.

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Thanks for that. As Jannis mentioned above, it runs on your server.

The more I think about this requirement the more uses I think of for such a service.

It is quite a common requirement for software developers, and RW Stacks is a good example, where there is a need for users to upload a project file to the developer. Such a service would be ideal and would only require that a user drags a file onto a web page upload area.

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But such solutions exist, even within RW. Itā€™s the requirement that the service doesnā€™t sit on your own server that throws the spanner into the works.

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Hmmā€¦ creating a stack for uploading to a AWS bucket would not be that difficult.

Question is: how does the link of the uploaded file gets from the uploaded (client) to you ?

By mail?

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Well for this application, the act of the user adding images to the web page drop area would need to generate that URL to the uploaded files and then email that URL to show what and where the files were uploaded to (together with some way of referencing the files).

An ideal flow would be that an end user would fill in a form on a web page, drain the files to an upload area and then press a submit button

That form information and a URL to the files would be sent to the web operator. The web operator could download the files from the URL, the files at that URL could be auto deleted by the service once they are downloaded after a few days.

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If the image will be deleted automatically after like a week, you could also use your own FTP share therefore?

Sounds pretty straight forward.

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What percentage of RW users use AWS buckets? 1%? Not much of a marketplace!

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This system I am searching for, would need to do the deleting so that it will run as a standalone service, in much the same was as Droplr and others do.

@steveb Such a system canā€™t have any dependence for the end users using any third party system.

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That can be done the following way: each time a new file is uploaded to the server, the script will check the date of the already uploaded files in the file system and deletes all older than x days.

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I guess such kind of form would be a great addition for repository stack.

Actually I used Droplr before to share beta versions of my stacks. As they now want to charge, I moved to my own FTP space with a repository stack. Much easier to use my own stuff šŸ˜†

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Yes it would. I didnā€™t fully appreciate what you meant by ā€œFTP shareā€, but a scrip to delete the contents after x days sounds like it may be a good solution.

File uploads work fine to a server up until you start filling the available space up. Deleting after x days woudl solve this.