Question

Another team member has written the feature to allow users to upload a photo using a http form and the Rails Paperclip gem.

I am currently working on a feature to import a list of photos from the users Facebook album.

I currently have a list of the Facebook image URLs that need to be saved. I am able to get rails to download them and save to a location but I can’t figure out how to trigger the paperclip process.

Where is the best place to add in my code to download the image from the URL?

Any ideas appreciated, thanks.

Answer 1

I have found the following question that answers my question.

Paperclip fetch image directly via url

Here’s what i’m doing to save my image:

      photo = Photo.new
      photo.picture_from_url("http://image_url_here..")
      photo.name = "photo_name"
      photo.description = "photo_description"
      photo.user_id = current_user.id
      photo.album_id = album_id
      photo.save

And I have this function in the Photo model. Note, picture is the image field that paperclip uses.

def picture_from_url(url)
    self.picture = open(url)
end