I recently found out about the Paperclip image uploading functionality for Ruby on Rails. I followed a few tutorials on youtube and got the gem to work (I think). All of the attributes for paperclip are working correctly. I added the columns to my “posts” table correctly, added the “multipart” on the form_for, and such but the image I uploaded is not being saved at all.
I did some research and found out that I need something called “ImageMagick” but when I tried to understand how to download it and install it into rails I got really confused. The tutorials I saw on youtube seemed to be beginner level. So, the fact that they didn’t mention anything about ImageMagick makes me think that I don’t need it to upload files at all.
I guess my question is twofold: 1) do I really need ImageMagick to use paperclip? 2) what else could be causing me a problem where there is no explicit error thrown by Rails ?
You need ImageMagick if you are uploading pictures. Follow this link to install it on your development machine: http://www.imagemagick.org/script/download.php
I suppose you are using Rails 3, follow this screencast (http://www.emersonlackey.com/article/paperclip-with-rails-3) to learn how to use Paperclip to upload multiple images in a model.
If you just want to upload avatar for user, for example, or see more tutorials here: https://github.com/thoughtbot/paperclip/wiki