Alex, try to design the plugin so that the location of the uploaded file is parametrized in some fashion. This should be determined by the user of the api, not internally in the api. This will make it much more flexible.

Image filename, width and height will automatically be stored in the database if you have the columns withe the right names. It works just like created_at and just gets filled in for you.

And the default image file directory storage uses creation date based sub directories. So instead of an image being at path/to/images/999.jpg, it will now be at path/to/images/2008/04/03/999.jpg. So now you will only get directory overflow errors if you get many thousands of uploads per day. If thats the case you have greater optimization concerns.

Get the new totally rewritten from scratch version here: http://github.com/Squeegy/fleximage/tree/master

http://www.dotrb.com/2007/6/9/attachment_fu-and-restful_authentication

They go into a little more detail about how to override plugin

http://uploadcolumn.rubyforge.org/

It provides methods to manipulate images on the fly or when storing it with RMagick!

You can use procs to set your filename and store dir!
So you can make complex filenames if you don’t want everyone accessing your pictures/files.

After using all the others (except fleximage) this one is my favourite. Much better documentation than attachment_fu, very simple to use, a lot like filecolumn but with a much more elegant way of retrieving image urls for your views.

You do it like so: @mypost.image.url

Or to get a thumbnail version @mypost.image.medium_thumbnail.url

The only difficulty i had with it was that my application wouldn’t start in production mode on media temple’s gridserver until i removed the plugin

attachment_fu is far the more sophisticated one. But that’s good and bad.
Good: MANY features.
bad: Hard to shape the code to your needs.

However, i choosed FlexImage. Simpler (no specific columns on db required, besides blob if you’ll use db storage, interface generic, simple and adaptable ).
About all files in one place, the other plugins aren’t better: for each image: 1 folder, 1 base image, thumbnails image, each in one folder. Plus, in database 1 row for image + 1 row for each thumbnail.
So, that’s worse to me.

The other thing, i don’t want to store each thumbnail, just the originals. FlexImage makes all of them on-the-fly. Think of millions of images with millions of thumbnails, and you decide to change the thumbnail size. You’ll want to die…

The other reason, is that i need to store 300Gb of images. So thumbnail space + number of files/folders it’s not low.

About the file information, well you can work it around by using a column on the database and using in the controller with params[’data’].original_filename and params[’data’].content_type if you want to.

Besides that, the shadow plus other effects ROCK!!!