How to serve images from an S3 bucket to an app?

I have built a React app in which user-uploaded images (avatars, profile wallpapers, etc) are stored in an S3 bucket. I wanted to understand what is the best possible way to serve those images back with the app.

Hi Annie!

You may stick to a set of best practices that prioritize simplicity, security, and efficiency in order to serve user-uploaded photos that are kept in an Amazon S3 bucket back to your React application. To start, set up your S3 bucket for static website hosting. This will make serving images straight from the bucket easier and using the S3 bucket URL directly in your React project possible by doing away with the requirement for server-side processing.

After that, modify the S3 bucket’s permissions to let the general public read access to the pictures. This makes it possible to access photos directly from clients (browsers) without requiring further authentication. In your React application, create picture URLs by fusing the S3 bucket URL with the user-uploaded image keys (paths). Using this simple method makes providing images in your app easier.

Now, think about using Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network (CDN), by putting your S3 bucket in front of a CloudFront distribution. Caching images closer to users, lowering latency, and improving the user experience overall, helps to enhance speed. To offer safe and time-limited access for private photos, create pre-signed URLs on your server side (backend). This provides an additional degree of protection by guaranteeing that only authorized users can access private photographs.

To improve performance, take into account incorporating web delivery optimizations such as image compression and lazy loading when creating URLs. Faster loading speeds are a result of these optimizations, particularly for consumers using different devices or networks. Lastly, to display the photos in your React app, use the built-in or pre-signed URLs. To provide a consistent and aesthetically attractive user experience across devices, think about implementing responsive design concepts.

You may effectively serve user-uploaded photos from an S3 bucket to your React app by following these best practices, which will guarantee a smooth and effective image-serving mechanism. Modify these rules in accordance with the particular needs and application architecture.

I recently made a project in Typescript Language and now I want to implement the feature called “file upload” so the end user can upload the file in S3 bucket from the dashboard without exposing my AWS credentials. Can someone help me to figure this out?

Yes, you can do this using the S3 pre-signed url. Your backend would need to create these temporary urls before the front end could use them. The urls can be used to upload or download files. Anyone with these urls can download or upload files to your bucket, however hot-linking is restricted due to the transitory nature of the urls.

Is it possible to download a file from an Amazon S3 bucket without having an AWS username and password?

Definitely, there are three typical methods for gaining access to S3 files and objects without using AWS credentials:

• Allowing access to the bucket, a folder inside the bucket, or specific items. The setup and use of this method is arguably the simplest, but your objects are, well, public.
• Front using CloudFront your bucket. With all of your files accessible through CloudFront edge locations, this enables you to keep your bucket completely private and speeds up your website.
• Using the pre-signed urls as explained in the above.