Need assistance choosing a image management gem

Question

I am interested in building a Rails based system for handling the display and organization of large amounts of photos. This is sort of like Flickr but smaller. Each photo will have metadata associated with it. Photos will be shown in a selectable list and grid view. It would be nice to be able to load images as they are needed as well (as this would probably speed things up).

At the moment I have a test version of my database working by images loading from the assets/images directory but it is beginning to run slow when displaying several images (200-600 images). This is due to the way I have my view setup. I am using a straight loop to display the images in both list and grid layouts.

I also manually resized the thumbnails and a medium sized image from a full sized source image. I am investigating other resizing methods. Any advice is appreciated here as well.

As I am new to handling the images this way, could someone point me in a direction based on experience designing and implementing something like Flickr?

I am investigating the following tools:

1. Paperclip
   • http://railscasts.com/episodes/134-paperclip
   • Requirements: ImageMajick
2. attachment_fu
   • http://clarkware.com/blog/2007/02/24/file-upload-fu#FileUploadFu
   • Requirement: One of the following: ImageScience, RMagick, miniMagick, ImageMajick?
3. CarrierWave
   • http://cloudinary.com/blog/ruby_on_rails_image_uploads_with_carrierwave_and_cloudinary
   • http://cloudinary.com/blog/advanced_image_transformations_in_the_cloud_with_carrierwave_cloudinary

Answer 1

Paperclip and CarrierWave are totally appropriate tools for the job, and the one you choose is going to be a matter of personal preference. They both have tons of users and active, ongoing development. The difference is whether you'd prefer to define your file upload rules in a separate class (CarrierWave), or if you'd rather define them inline in your model (Paperclip).

I prefer CarrierWave, but based on usage it's clear plenty of people feel otherwise.

Note that neither gem is going to do anything for your slow view with 200-600 images. These gems are just for handling image uploads, and don't help you with anything beyond that.

Note also that Rails is really pretty bad at handling file uploads and file downloads, and you should avoid this where possible by letting other services (a cdn, your web server, s3, etc) handle these for you. The central gotcha is that if you handle a file transfer with rails, your entire web application process is busy for the duration of the transfer. (For related discussion on this topic, see: Best Ruby on Rails Architecture for Image Heavy App).

Answer 2

I'd go with Carrierwave anyday. It is very flexible and has lot of useful strategies. It generates it's on Uploader class and has all nifty and self explanatory features such as automatic generation of thumbnails (as specified by you), blacklisting, formatting image, size constraints etc; which you can put to your use.

This Railscast by Ryan Bates - http://railscasts.com/episodes/253-carrierwave-file-uploads is very useful, if you haven't seen it already.