With the rise of social media and collaborative sites, users are sharing more of their own content than ever. While users upload many different types of content to these sites, for this post I am focusing on photos.
Chances are if you code for the web you have or will have to write code to allow users to upload their photos. In the old days you could get away with a simple file selection and upload. However now days’ users expect to preview their images and to be able to use a few simple editing features on the photo before uploading it. In this post I write about photo rotation and cropping, but depending on the context they may expect more. The more might include tools like photo filters or user tagging.
Before starting this project, I Googled a bit to see what was already out there. While I found quite a few examples and libraries to show an image preview, none of those allowed any editing of the photo before upload. I feel that giving the user some basic editing ability is important, and what’s more I think users expect to have that ability on modern websites. So with that idea in mind I began creating a photo upload and preview widget with these basic tools.
I didn’t want to rewrite a graphics library as plenty of those already exist, but I would have to choose one for this project. I’ve used Paper.js for other projects in the past and my familiarity with it is the sole reason I chose it for this project. I’m sure any other similar library would work just as well, especially since this project does not call for any complex graphical work. That being said, Paper.js also has other raster features that would make implementing future improvements like photo filters an easy task.
For this project I started by building the HTML and CSS to structure the layout. The photo tool icons are SVG images that can be styled by CSS. For photo section I used a standard file input. The change event on this input tigers a custom function that adds the image to the Paper.js canvas and activates the edit controls. For the photo itself I didn’t want to affect its resolution by resizing the image, so when the image is added I use the view zoom to fit the photo in the viewport. This preserves the original photo size and resolution.
Rotation was easy as there was built in functions to do this. The hard part was dealing with cropping the image after rotation. Paper.js does not return image dimensions correctly when that image is rotated. The position and dimensions are those of the non-rotated image. To compensate I had to write code to rotate the given position and dimensions.
After the rotation issue solved, I then had to extract the image as a dataURL and craft an AJAX request. That finished up the client side part of the code. As a proof of concept I created a quick php receiving file. It takes the given dataURL and creates an image file on the server. It’s just a skeleton but could be easily adapted to most projects.
I’ve created a repository on GitHub for this project for interested readers. Also check out the client side code on this CodePen:
See the Pen Upload Image and Preview by Alec Dhuse (@alecdhuse) on CodePen.