What is the best way to allow users to email images audio or video to our website?

Question

Does anyone have any experience developing a way to allow users to upload photographs (and possibly video) to a website to be stored in a database from mobile devices? We will be running our system on a UNIX platform and most of the system logic is written in PHP and data is stored in a MySQL database.

1. Members will be given an email address which they will send attachments to. When a new member joins a new email address will be created with the users unique username.
2. Attached images, video or audio will be parsed, stored on the server and a record of the image etc added to the database.
3. Is it possible to provide a way to send photos by text message / multimedia message
4. What about iPhone, eyefi cards etc would these send photos using email that we could parse?

cheers

Answer 1

The easiest way to do this is to run a cron task that connects to the POP/IMAP account, grabs all the emails and processes through them.

There are probably several libraries to help you out with this but if you want to write your own the basic steps are:

1) Go out, get the email
2) Find the attachments
(You are going to want to look up 'getting attachments from emails through PHP')
3) Find any Body information you actually want to keep (Descriptions/etc)
4) Write it to the Database

About iPhone emails: All emails are created equal because it is a pretty open format, except for some proprietary products. I'm guessing that the iPhone will send an attachment similar to any other email client.

The MMS side I can't help you with.