Uploading and storing images remotely?

Question

I'm building a rails application where users may want to upload images occasionally. Is there a way to have the users seamlessly upload the images to a remote host, like imgur, and store the URLs to the images in my database so that they can be displayed when needed?

I want to give the impression that they are uploading images directly to the database while actually offloading them to imgur. Is there a gem that does this, or does anybody have a good way to implement this?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Not sure about imgur, but if what you want is simply storing the images on the remote server, I think s3 + paperclip can be a good choice.

aws sdk: http://aws.amazon.com/articles/8621639827664165

paperclip: https://github.com/thoughtbot/paperclip

Answer 2

Using "gem 'carrierwave'" and "gem 'fog'" to upload to Google Cloud Storage or Amazon S3 is probably your best option.

http://railscasts.com/episodes/383-uploading-to-amazon-s3