S3 Album Publisher

A pure client-side photo album publisher for S3.

Try it out here with your own S3 bucket, or view a demo of a published album.

Overview

• Browse your bucket for photos.
• Publish albums from your photos.
• Share albums with their public URL.

The albums you publish are private: they can only be found if you know the album's URL.

Being a pure web-app means:

• Configuration-free: upload the scripts to S3 and start publishing albums right away.
• Database-free: no database is required for creating or viewing albums. Albums are self contained and portable.
• No server-side scripts: all the operations are done in your browser, including resizing photos and thumbnails.

Getting Started

1. Upload view.html, publish.html and publish.js to a path in your S3 bucket, for example, public-albums/. This can be done with s3cmd:

s3cmd put view.html publish.html publish.js s3://bucket/public-albums/

2. In your browser, navigate to https://s3.region.amazonaws.com/bucket/public-albums/publish.html, enter your S3 credentials, and start publishing albums!

   For example, https://s3.sa-east-1.amazonaws.com/www.mycooldomain.com.br/public-albums/publish.html

   Since you're sending your AWS credentials, use HTTPS.

3. CloudFront and FQDN doesn't work - you need to make use of the S3 API endpoint all the time.

How It Works

Publishing

publish.html uses the Amazon JavaScript SDK to browse your bucket for photos you would like to publish in an album. When you create a new album, a directory in your published albums path is created. For example, the album with name 'My Holiday Pics' is created in public-albums/albums/My Holiday Pics/. When you add a photo to the album:

• it is copied, resized, and placed in public-albums/albums/My Holiday Pics/photos/; and
• a thumbnail is created and placed in public-albums/albums/My Holiday Pics/thumbs/.

That's all there is to publishing. No databases. No calls to server-side scripts. No adding filenames to index files.

Viewing

view.html is used to view published albums. The name of the album is specified in the hash of the URL, for example, https://s3.region.amazonaws.com/bucket/public-albums/view.html#My%20Holiday%20Pics. The photos for the album are found by listing the contents of albums/My Holiday Pics/photos/ (relative to the location of view.html) and then dynamically added to the page.

S3 Bucket Policy

Anonymous access

If you want anyone on the web to view your published albums, your bucket policy should allow anonymous getObject and listBucket requests. If your bucket doesn't already allow anonymous requests, the mimimum you need to add is:

• A statement allowing aonymous getObject requests to the path of your published albums, for example public-albums/:

{
  "Sid": "AnonGetAlbumObjects",
  "Effect": "Allow",
  "Principal": "*",
  "Action": "s3:GetObject",
  "Resource": [
    "arn:aws:s3:::bucket/public-albums/*",
    "arn:aws:s3:::bucket/favicon.ico"
  ]
},

• A statement allowing anyone to list the contents of the individual album directories (but not list all the albums that you have):

{
  "Sid": "AnonListObjects",
  "Effect": "Allow",
  "Principal": "*",
  "Action": "s3:ListBucket",
  "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::bucket",
  "Condition": {
    "StringLike": {
      "s3:prefix": "public-albums/albums/*/"
    }
  }
},

S3 user

The S3 user (also called principal) that you use to publish the albums should have permission to:

• read and list the paths where the original photos are stored; and
• read, list and write the path where the albums are published to, again, for example, public-albums/.

If your user has all permisions on the whole bucket, then no changes to the bucket policy are necessary. However, if you want to restrict your user to the minimum permisions necessary, add the following statements:

• Grant permission to read (but not write) the paths where the original photos are stored:

{
  "Sid": "ReadMyPhotosDir",
  "Effect": "Allow",
  "Principal": {
    "AWS": "arn:aws:iam::1234567890:user/my_albums_user"
  },
  "Action": "s3:GetObject",
  "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::bucket/my/photo/collection/*"
}

• Permission to list the paths where the original photos are stored, as well as the published albums:

{
  "Sid": "OnlyListSomeDirs",
  "Effect": "Allow",
  "Principal": {
    "AWS": "arn:aws:iam::1234567890:user/my_albums_user"
  },
  "Action": "s3:ListBucket",
  "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::bucket",
  "Condition": {
    "StringLike": {
      "s3:prefix": [
        "my/photo/collection/*",
      "public-albums/*"
      ]
    }
  }
},

• Finally, the user should have full control over the directory where the published albums are stored:

{
  "Sid": "ObjectActionsOnAlbumsDir",
  "Effect": "Allow",
  "Principal": {
    "AWS": "arn:aws:iam::1234567890:user/my_albums_user"
  },
  "Action": "s3:*",
  "Resource": [
    "arn:aws:s3:::bucket/public-albums/*",
  "arn:aws:s3:::bucket/public-albums"
  ]
},

Custom install

It is also possible to store the albums in your bucket, but keep the view.html on another website. To do this, you can edit the configuration in view.html to point to your S3 bucket. Also, you will need to ensure the CORS configuration for your bucket allows requests from different origins:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<CORSConfiguration xmlns="http://s3.amazonaws.com/doc/2006-03-01/">
  <CORSRule>
    <AllowedOrigin>*</AllowedOrigin>
    <AllowedMethod>HEAD</AllowedMethod>
    <AllowedMethod>GET</AllowedMethod>
    <AllowedMethod>PUT</AllowedMethod>
    <AllowedMethod>POST</AllowedMethod>
    <AllowedMethod>DELETE</AllowedMethod>
    <MaxAgeSeconds>3000</MaxAgeSeconds>
    <ExposeHeader>ETag</ExposeHeader>
    <ExposeHeader>x-amz-meta-custom-header</ExposeHeader>
    <AllowedHeader>*</AllowedHeader>
  </CORSRule>
</CORSConfiguration>

Dependencies

The following dependencies are included in the HTML files and hosted by CDNs (cdnjs and Goolge Hosted Libraries):

• Bootstrap
• jQuery
• Fancybox
• Amazon JavaScript SDK

Optional: External Image Resizer

By default, image resizing is done in the browser. This means that the original image is downloaded from S3, resized and then uploaded to its final location. This may perform badly with large photos, slow internet connections and/or slow web browsers. Furthermore, the resizing in the browser isn't perfect and may introduce artifacts.

There is a hook in publish.js to plugin your own image resizer. You can, for example, send a XHR request to a PHP script that will download, resize and upload the photo/thumb to the bucket.

TODO / Contributing

(Here's where you come in)

• Automatically detect settings (bucket name, paths, etc.)
• Support regions other than us-east-1
• Choose photo and thumb sizes in settings dialog
• Resize images in the browser without introducing artifacts.
• Upload images directly from publish.html
• Generate thumbnails for the bucket file browser
• Select multiple files to add at the same time
• Filter selectable file types
• Make the general design more pretty