Hi all,
started a new side project, and I’m interested what you think of it.
Edit: This project provides a super simple API to enable devs to easily store and access files in the cloud, without any registration.
End users can use the site to collect files from anyone. For example: For teachers, it’s often required to collect digital products form their students at the end of a lesson. They need to be able to do it „ad-hoc“ and super easy.
So I came up with www.collect-files.com. Simply share a link and let people upload files for you. No login required. Might also be fun for wedding parties or something 
I build this using Meteor 3.3, React, Meteor-Files+S3, BullMQ (+redis) and chose mantine as a ui framework. Started this last Saturday, after my normal work. Currently this is running on a single 256mb container at Scalingo; web instance doubles as a queue worker at the moment, but the worker can easily be started as a separate container.
Really like prototyping with meteor 
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I really like it. During winter (in the UAE) I follow friends on the mountain in competitions for trail running. I take photos for them … and I usually end up with covering the whole event with 2000+ photos.
Competitions are organized by a friend, they are the hardest ultra runs in the region. There are multiple official photographers, and me always as an unofficial one, and we push the content to the Google Drive of the organizer.
You have the acquisition and this part I really like. The distribution part would be really interesting. I know some apps that do bib and face recognition so that you can get your photos without going through thousands of other people’s photos.
Something you need to consider: I guess you upload the raw to S3. Browsers don’t support the highly efficient photos newer mobiles produce (.HEIC or .HEIF file extensions) so you will need to run some Lambdas at the S3 end with something like SharpJS if you want to accept them. But you will not have previews of these images, and if you don’t accept them, they will not be available to pick from your mobile. However, many people take all their photos in HEIC (or equivalent) format on their mobiles.
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I’m using Moodle for this kind of learn activity.
Will this be open source? It feels like a very useful thing, and could have many applications. I could see value in letting the community help
@paulishca I added higher tiers for dropzones, so you can get up to 4 gb storage easily, with no limit on the number of files.
@klaucode Moodle is nice, but your students need to login etc; if you only have 3 minutes left with a classroom full of 12 year olds, you’ll be glad to be able to just give them a QR code to scan.
@mikkelking Maybe yes; I recently added a simple API to allow developers to use this thing in their own apps, to make storing files in the cloud super easy; the idea is like this:
Super Simple Files in the Cloud
- A dev can simply create an api key, with no registration required: https://www.collect-files.com/devs
- Charge the API key with some GB-months. Then you can use the API key on your server to create a dropzone for your users, with custom storage capacity and expiration time. On your server, you can associate dropzones with your users.
- Use the dropzone id to upload, list, remove and download files via simple api endpoints. OpenAPI docs available here: https://www.collect-files.com/docs
I always found it quite annoying to setup S3, get it up and running with Meteor-Files, manage download and uploads, files collection etc. Maybe this could be a quick starter for prototyping. What do you think?
When we were developing one of our apps for real estate agents, one of the pain points was that they mostly use their laptops to list properties, but the images they took were on their phones. We have now solved it, but I can imagine this as a quick solution for these use cases, wherein the photos are on the phone while the user uses a different device, e.g., a work laptop.
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If you’d like to try out the developer features, simply use the voucher code METEOR2025 to top up your free API key with 1 GB-month of storage duration. I’d be very interested to hear what you think.
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