May 21, 2007

Cropper Plugin: Send to Amazon S3

I have found it more useful recently to use Amazon S3 to host things like screen captures that I take using my favorite capture tool, Cropper. I original wrote a Send to Flickr plugin that according to feedback that I have received people have found fairly useful. However, after using it for awhile, I realized that I was just cluttering up my Flickr account.

In the meantime, I had begun using Amazon S3 services quite extensively and realized that it was quite easy to use in this hosting scenario -- that is what it is intended to do. So, I finally set down this afternoon and put together a working version of what has been in my head for a number of weeks now.

It's hosted on CodePlex and look for an official build/release soon of all of our plugins (including this one). We have been getting back online after the Great Crash of CodePlex TFS02. Until then, you can find a private build I made this afternoon and am currently using here.

In order to make use of the plugin you'll need an Amazon Web Services account. You only are charged for the space and bandwidth you use, but don't worry -- it's dirt cheap.

Once you have an account you'll configure the plugin under the Options menu, selecting Send to Amazon S3 as the plugin:

Copy and paste your ID and Key from your AWS account, hit Refresh to see a list of buckets you've created and select one. You currently can't create a bucket from this interface (next release, I promise), so you'll need to create it in another front end (S3 FireFox plugin is great for this).

Enter a base key that you wish to put images in under the bucket (this will be the base URL combined with the Bucket). The captures will be underneath this "folder" in the format of Guid.NewGuid().ToString() + ".png" (e.g. the url for the image above is: http://s3.amazonaws.com/paltman.com/images/8d3ce059-4a0c- 45b8-b4e8-034965facaf7.png).

Tags: cropper, cropper plugin, plugin, codeplex