which gem to use for uploading photos for making albums

Question

hi i've been googling around and cant really find the most obvius answer for which gem would be best to use.

if i would be using it for lets say creating albums, avatars and thumbnails. that means also allowing multiple pictures upload, ofcourse resizing them and maybe adding them borders.

i've come across RMagick, MiniMagick, PaperClip, Attachment_fu, Attribute_fu, ImageScience

which one do you reccomend and why? probably PaperClip would be best to handle simple stuff here. or maybe MiniMagick also. i'm not sure.

would appreciate any comments on these gems for uploading photos.

Answer 1

I would go with PaperClip. You will need to install RMagick and ImageMagick as well.

PaperClip gives you the ability to attach the images to columns in your model and easily implement them in your views/controllers.

RMagick provides a Ruby API to ImageMagick (which is a popular image manipulation library). You will need to install both ImageMagick and then RMagick. Then you can do things like create thumbnails and resize images programmatically. Almost all of the file attachement libraries will require RMagick/ImageMagick.

(I've also used attachment_fu in the past, that is a good gem as well -- PaperClip seems to be the most popular these days though.)