profile pictures - how to store

Question

in my website, user can upload a profile image.
I wanted to know what is the best way to store those images.
my thought is simply dedicated directory. the image name will be the user_id.

is that a good solution, or there's a smarter one?

Answer 1

You have two options, store the images or use an external source (gravatar).

If you're going to store the images, do you want these images to be publically available or are they private? If they are publically available, then you can store them in your public folder.

You can use something like carrierwave to handle the uploading, versioning and storing of the images.

For public stuff, I'll store the file in the public directory under the uploader/model name/field name/id location. This is more for organizational purposes on my part.

Check out http://railscasts.com/episodes/253-carrierwave-file-uploads for a good tutorial.

For private images, I'll set the store directory to something outside of the public folder and will create a download action within the controller with the file. This way, the user cannot download the file unless it goes through the controller action. With authorization (cancan) I can allow or disallow a user to access the download action for that particular file (hence making it somewhat secure). If you are going to be using a production server like apache or nginx, make sure that you set the appropriate handlers for sending the file (ie x_sendfile).

Answer 2

Its very common to store images in a directory for small applications. However there are a few of things to take into consideration here:

• Do you have anticipate a lot of users? If you have a million users, storing everyone's photo in your directory will take up a lot of memory when running your application

• Are you deploying on Heroku? Many RoR apps are, and if you deploy on Heroku it will destroy any files you store locally when your app is moved to a different dyno (and you generally have no way of predicting when this will happen). You can read about the Ephemeral filesystem here https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dynos#isolation-and-security

• In general I would advise against storing all your images locally because rewriting the code as you scale will become painful. I recommend you upload to an Amazon S3 Bucket and download the images as you need (and cache them for when your user is logged in). Its helpful becasue you might have to deal with image processing (for example resizing the images that are uploaded, creating thumbnail versions of the uploaded images) and its easier to do this when you have background processes that have persistent access to these files. I've used the 'aws' gem and S3 libraries for this, and its really easy to use, you can read more about it here: http://amazon.rubyforge.org/

• However, if you intend for this to be a small app and are not deploying on Heroku, just saving it to a local directory is a lot easier and pain-free