I'm trying to build a E-commerce site with a admin page where the administrator can upload images of certain products.
I'd like Meteor to upload those images to a folder and then display those images in the product page of that product.
I know that normally the image files that the client will be using should be inside the 'public' folder, but I'd like to know more about what other options I might have.
Also, if I upload a new file to the 'public' folder or if I delete a file in the 'public' folder, the website refreshes itself...and this is good and bad at the same time depending on what effect you are after....
Here are my questions:
- What if I create a 'uploads' folder in the server and upload the images to that folder. Would it be possible to display the images inside the 'uploads' folder in the client browser??? How??
- Is there a way to use the browser to access the contents of the 'public' folder???
- Is there a way to stop the 'reactivity' of the site if changes happen in the 'uploads' folder created?
- Is uploading the images to the 'public' folder the best solution available to this problem?
Thank you very much for the help
When dealing with what will likely be a large number of images I like to offload not only the storage but also the processing to a third party.
My go-to app in this situation would be Cloudinary. Here's why:
- Storage - I can store the original images outside of my application. A huge benefit to keep images in sync from dev to prod.
- CDN - I get the extra benefits of images being quickly loaded from the Cloudinary CDN.
- Off-load Processing - All of the processing of images is handled by Cloudinary which doesn't slow down my app as a whole.
- Image Manipulation - I can make calls to the original image, calls to just get a thumbnail, and calls to change manipulate, ie :effect => grayscale. So if a 1000x1000px image was uploaded, I can request a 50x50px from Cloudinary that will return the image cropped to that exact size rather than using CSS to shrink a huge image.
- Flexibility - I can change the size of images and return that exact size to the app without having to re-upload images. For example, if my product page pulled in thumbs at 40px, I could easily make a call to grab the same image at 50px.
Hope this helps.
http://cloudinary.com/
You can do all of this using the meteor package collectionFS. The package is well documented and you have a variety of options that you can uses for storing the uploaded files. CollectionFS also gives the ability for image manipulation on the upload, such as creating a resized thumbnail.
I realized this question is a bit old.
I had the same problem, one of the solution that works for me is using meteor-upload https://github.com/tomitrescak/meteor-tomi-upload-jquery
Definitely don't store stuff in the public directory - it will slow down starting up the app, and hot code refreshes on image upload could easily cause it to crash once there are a decent number of images in there.
Any of the above solutions with storing images elsewhere would work. One other option is using the peerlibrary:aws-sdk package to upload stuff to S3, which is what I use for several apps and have found to be very clean.
Storing the image as a base64 string in MongoDB is also a method. Useful for posting to APIs and save the worry of having to handle other 3rd Parties.