rails - Amazon S3 make image files public

Question

I have a general question about Amazon and making the product image files public.

Currently, my config.fog_public = false which makes my files private. This is not an issue on the website as people are able to view the images, etc.

The issue arose when I used AddThis to share the product page. The image is uploaded to the facebook share dialog box and everything is fine. But, the image of the product disappears from the image portion of the share dialog after about a week or two.

I did some research and realized it's because if i change the line from config.fog_public = false to config.fog_public = true, then all my files are public and things "should" work.

I am just curious as to what the repercussions of doing this is. Can someone else change the product image of the file since this is public access now? Or is this standard if you want to share the image across the web?

Thanks.

Answer 1

After some time, I realized I have to make the images public. Because I only wanted to make the product images public and not the other images, I used Carrierwave and added the following to my uploader file.

configure do |c|
  c.fog_public = true # or false
end

That solved both problems. Got it from this question.