Flask - Serving user-uploaded images to the webpage

Question

So I am working on a Flask application which is pretty much a property manager that involves allowing users to upload images of their properties. I am new to Flask and have never had to deal with images before. From a lot of Googling I understand that there are various ways to manage static files like images.

One way is to allow users to upload images directly to the file system, and then displaying it by retrieving the file location in the static folder using something like:

<img src="static/images/filename.jpg">

However, is this really an efficient way since this means storing generating and storing the location of each image URL in the database? Especially when it comes to deploying the application? Another way I discovered was using base64 encoding and storing the image directly into the database, which also doesn't sound very efficient either.

Another way, which I think might be the best to go about this, is to use an AWS S3 bucket. The user would then be able to upload an image directly to that bucket and be assigned a URL to that image. This URL is stored in the database and can then be used to display the image similarly to the file system method. Is my understanding of this correct? Is there a better way to go about this? And is there something similar to django-storages that can be used to connect Flask to S3?

Any input or pointing me in the right direction would be much appreciated. Thank you!

Answer 1

If you want to store the images in the web server then the best approach for you is to use nginx as proxy in front of flask and let nginx serve the static folder for all the images.

Nginx is pretty much enough for a small website. Don't try to serve the file using flask. It is too slow.

If you want to store the images in s3,then you just need to store the name of image in bucket in the database. You can tell flask to use s3 bucket as the static folder. You can use boto3 library in python to access s3. https://boto3.amazonaws.com/v1/documentation/api/latest/guide/quickstart.html

If you are concerned of exposing s3 bucket to users, then you can use cloudfront distribution. It is cheaper in terms of price to serve and also hides your bucket.