I’m looking at providing functionality for a client who needs to receive digital pictures from clients along with their signed contracts (paper scans). They don’t really want to use email and wetransfer or file transfer sites might be too complex.
I did suggest google drive and share a folder for the client to copy files into.
Is there something else in the web community I could be looking at? Adding something more personalised into their website I think would be best from a seamless point of view.
How big are the files? If they are uploading digi pics my guess is the files will be huge. This will most likely cause you major headaches when uploading via a form, not least that the server will most likely default to max uploads of around 2mb, so you’d need to change this in the php ini file. If you can. Many hosts don’t allow it.
Hi Nick. I think that “receiving digital pictures from clients” could result in big amounts of data to be sent. Normal forms with file upload capabilities are dependent on a setting in PHP ini file on the hosting providers server. With the result that it’s often not possible to upload for example a zip file with 20 images of about 40 Megabytes.
But FormsPlus from Chillidog could come to the rescue here, since it supports “file chunking”, which allows sending files of any size: https://chillidogsoftware.com/products/stacks/formsplus
I’m using it on my own site for years now and it’s working absolutely flawless, whatever size the uploaded files do have (sometimes over 100 MB).
@Pyrobrit I don’t know if this is the solution but I’d explore the Repository stack by @instacks. It comes with its own authentication (pretty basic) or you can pair with Sitelok quite nicely.
I’ved used for a course in audio podcasting where students (about 30) were always uploading WAV or MP3 files of about 8 minutes or less. Worked just fine. It also comes with a relatively new feature that may help called “Scale Uploaded JPEG Images” and you can set a max image width and max image height.
Of course uploading PDFs is a breeze. You can get automatic email notifications whenever something is uploaded.
I’m not really thinking it out but it all depends a bit on how many clients thay have. You could set up a Repository stack with a unique address for each one. Easy enough if 10 clients, a bit of a hassle if 500.
You mentioned contracts, that usually indicates sensitive or at minimum private information. I’d be hesitant to even think about email and definitely not Google drive.
As mentioned above images and in particular scanned documents often get very big. Depending on the hosting company and plan that could be an issue.
I’d probably suggest using anyone of many “secure document portal” services out there. Most aren’t overly complicated to utilize and they take on all the liability of the information safe and secure.
I second Repository suggested by @rovertek … but if you’re open to other suggestions outside of RW which can still be integrated into a website - look into Sync. They offer not only a password protected portal uploads via URL, but also custom branding. Sort of like Dropbox, but I think cheaper and uncluttered.
The Repository stack sounds indeed like a good solution. But…: will one be able to upload a 180 MB (or more) file there (which could take several minutes)? I’m not sure if the most hosting providers will allow that. Forms Plus splits the files to upload in small segments, uploads them and puts them together again on the server, so there’s no limit to the file size. Maybe Jannis can make this clearer for us? @instacks
how much server space do you have? If someone has an account with only 1 or 2 Gb, plus allows clients to upload big files then there may be bottlenecks. If uploads are essentially downloaded (then removed from server) within 24 hours maybe not an issue.
I believe I had a limit in terms of files on my server. I asked my hosting company to up that limit from something like 12 Mb to 256 Mb. Then all worked fine. But it’s quite possible not all hosting services are as generous.
Forms Plus may be the better solution overall depending on a variety of factors. We just don’t know enough about the use case right now.
