Full-Stack React Projects - Second Edition

Uploading a profile photo

Allowing a user to upload a profile photo will require that we store the uploaded image file and retrieve it on request to load it in the view. There are multiple ways of implementing this upload feature while considering the different file storage options:

• Server filesystem: Upload and save files to a server filesystem and store the URL in MongoDB.
• External file storage: Save files to external storage such as Amazon S3 and store the URL in MongoDB.
• Store as data in MongoDB: Save files that are small in size (less than 16 MB) to MongoDB as data of the Buffer type.

For MERN Social, we will assume that the photo files that are uploaded by the user will be small in size and demonstrate how to store these files in ...