What are my options for developing a method to allow users to upload photos and video to my website from a mobile device

Question

I want to allow users of my website to upload photos and video from their mobile phone. I have a web-based upload page (built using Flash) that posts uploads to a PHP script running on an Apache web server in Amazon EC2 cloud. I would like to use the same server to receive files uploaded by mobile.

The 3 options as I see it are - (could do all)

1) Develop a mobile browser optimised upload page (eg xhtml) - there is a tutorial mentioned in another question about this on stackoverflow. This would require the user to login beforehand so I know who has uploaded the file and where to put it in database.

2) Develop an app that will be able to access file system of mobile device and upload files. This could be configured once with the username and password of a user so uploading is a little easier.

3) provide an email address for users to send files to from their phone

And I suppose there is the option of using a 3rd party service for this, are there any open source scripts around?

Are there any other considerations I need to be aware of? How does iPhone fit in to this - I know that Flash for iPhone is not supported (yet) but will be in the next version of Flash (for apps not browser based). The tutorial I mentioned above would not work with iPhone either as you cannot get access to file system on iphone via web page.

any other information is greatly appreciated. many thanks

Answer 1

Option 1 is not possible on all phone OSes, especially the iPhone OS.

Option 2 is too expensive in time and resources, because you would have to make sure the app runs on all phone OSes and each and every device. Think different screen dimensions, touch screen or not, has a camera or not. Developing native apps is just too much hassle for just an upload feature.

Option 3 is supported by many - if not, all - smartphones. Email is incredibly easy to explain, just place a mailto link on your users personal page so he can click to launch his phone's standard email client. He can also save the email address as a contact and "share" media with this new "contact".

I think you should go for option 3.

Answer 2

I think a lot of sites support text/photo messaging, but that could be costly to set up the number and run it.

Answer 3

Expose your photo upload as a RESTful web service, then you can connect to it with any client imaginable.

If you want to connect using the iPhone you'll use NSURLRequest, NSURLConnection, and UIImageJPGRepresentation().