Need an advice on image hosting with web interface and API

Question

I need a recommendation for some image hosting with a fancy web-interface for uploading pics and an API (or even better — an iOS SDK) to get those photos in a mobile app.

I'm aware of that question: Need recommendation for image hosting with API access. However, I don't need any image-uploading API, what I need is a way to populate galleries of photos to my iOS app users: upload the pics through a web interface, and then be able to retrieve all of them in the app. So there shouldn't be any user authentication in the mobile app, and the photos are meant to be public.

I'm looking into several flickr iOS API libraries, but I'm not sure if any of them can be used without user authentication — e.g. by anonymously pulling the galleries of some specific app-hardcoded user (me). Or maybe I'm overthinking and there's another suitable solution that I'm missing?

Any help is highly appreciated!

Answer 1

Ok, it turned out that Flickr is more or less the thing I needed — it obviously has a nice web-interface for managing your photos, and there are a bunch of components to access these galleries on iOS device (for instance, https://github.com/devedup/FlickrKit and https://github.com/lukhnos/objectiveflickr). Moreover, you don't need to log in to access publicly available photo sets and collections, so I decided to go for this option.

Answer 2

I am not sure if you would like to host this image hosting service by yourself.

if you don't, then you can take a look at ImageS3, https://github.com/images3/images3-play.

An open and free image hosting service run on top of Amazon S3. It is like other cloud image hosting service which provides REST api, web interface admin console.