Ruby on Rails File Upload Plugin Update

Posted by Charles | April 8, 2008 .

I reviewed three Ruby on Rails file upload plugins last year. They are Acts As Attachment, File Column Plugin and FlexImage. Besides, readers suggested other plugins such as attachment_fu, upload_column and Flash applet.

This is a update on one of them, FlexImage. Just you know, I like the name of it but it has nothing to do with Adobe Flex.

I listed couple of cons about FlexImage in that post. The new release seems solved all of them. According to Alex Wayne:

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 that’s the case you have greater optimization concerns.

I haven’t got my hands on it yet but it’s definitely a great improvement.

The other half of the problem comes from the need to send the uploaded images back to the web browser. Most of the time, you need to display the image in different sizes or formats in different places on your site. If that’s one of your concern when dealing with images, then the image rendering part of FlexImage will be a big bonus to you.