Need advice for image hosting websites

Question

I'm developing my personal photography portfolio using Ruby on rails. I'm not at all saving those images in my assets/images folder as there are many high resolution images which will cost increase in size of the site folder. So i thought to upload those pics on some image hosting websites so that ill only give a URL of that pic which will dramatically cost in decreasing the size of the site folder. Ive three questions regarding my portfolio: 1. Is this the right way to do for portfolio websites? 2. What are the best image hosting websites for such need? 3. On what basis ill use the database for my portfolio?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You should check out some CDN (Content Delivery Network) service like

• Amazon S3 + Amazon CloudFront
• Rackspace Cloud Files
• Cloudinary

Ruby has many gems for managing cloud services like these. For example:

• fog gem (actively developed by guys at Heroku and Engine Yard)
• cloudinary gem
• carrierwave gem (handles automatic uploading to CDN and database storage)
• carrierwave + cloudinary (easy tutorial here)

Answer 2

You could also use Paperclip which can link to AWS as well to store all the images and manage the storage logic as well.

https://github.com/thoughtbot/paperclip