A html5 web app for mobile safari to upload images

Question

Is it possible to write a HTML5 web application designed for the iOS devices (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch) which can allow the user to upload an image from the filesystem?

Imagine uploading a new photo to your twitter avatar via a web app.

Answer 1

Safari on iOS 6.0 is the 1st to add support for <input type="file"> by allowing you to:

• take a new video or photo
• select a video or photo from the library

Here's how it looks on iOS10:

iOS9 introduced iCloud Drive and More options including Dropbox. iOS 6 through 8 had only the 1st two options.

You can limit the file types to just photos by using the accept="image/*" attribute:

<input type="file" accept="image/*" > will limit the options to just photos:

On the Android side Android 2.2+ is the 1st to support the above code.

Disclaimer: image courtesy of Pipe which handles video recording where I am CTO

Answer 2

I like the picup solution at http://picupapp.com

Answer 3

You will be able to upload photos using safari in iOS 6 onwards. Although the above workarounds will still be neccesary for iOS 5 and below.

Answer 4

I found an acceptable work around for this. Add a mailTo link on the page with predefined instructions which shows the user how to copy paste an image from his camera roll into the email. Then, write a job/script that listens to that inbox for inbound emails, strip the image and process accordingly.

It's not perfect, but they click the link from safari and then only need to go to photos, copy and come back to your app. After trying it on my phone, it's more than an acceptable work around that allows me to move forward without writing an App.

    <div data-role="collapsible" data-collapsed="true" id="uploadPicContainer" data-theme="d">
    <h3>{l t='Upload Picture'}</h3>
    <a href="mailto:[e-mail]?subject={l t='My pictures of'} {$var_biz.bizname}[{$var_biz.id}]!&body={l t='To upload a picture go to your Camera Roll and copy paste an image to this area in the email.  We will apply your picture after review!'}">{l t='Click here to upload pictures of'} {$var_biz.bizname}</a>
</div>

Answer 5

UPDATE: iOs 6 Safari is going to support upload videos and images from the Photo Library.

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I hate this word, but, it's impossible (up now). Here is the reasons:

1) mobile safari doesn't support upload anything.

2) mobile safari can't access ios components (actually it can, but, only through phonegap)

Answer 6

An idea I just thought of is to have a textbox that the user could paste a url into, allowing the user to use dropbox or a similar app and copy a public url of the dropbox file. Then the server would be able to download from the dropbox server.

I need to support filetypes other than images so it sounds like picupapp won't work for me.