{"id":22105,"date":"2020-06-29T16:35:02","date_gmt":"2020-06-29T16:35:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/securely_uploading_images_to_cloudinary_by_email"},"modified":"2020-06-29T16:35:02","modified_gmt":"2020-06-29T16:35:02","slug":"securely_uploading_images_to_cloudinary_by_email","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloudinary.com\/blog\/securely_uploading_images_to_cloudinary_by_email","title":{"rendered":"Securely Uploading Images to Cloudinary by Email With Heroku and Sendgrid"},"content":{"rendered":"

Despite United States founder Benjamin Franklin\u2019s wisdom that three can keep a secret if two of them are dead, you as developers often need contributions from third parties for your project. However, in today\u2019s digital world, security in software development is a predominant concern. With respect to management of rich media, it\u2019d be ideal if those folks could upload images or videos to your Cloudinary account without having to log in.<\/p>\n

This post explains how to enable third parties, including project contributors and end-users, to do that by email with free, integrated tools<\/strong>, including SendGrid, Cloudinary\u2019s email server. Actually, that basic function already exists in many electronic devices, from smartphones to smart fridges. Setting it up is a snap.<\/p>\n

The Process Flow<\/h2>\n

First, you need an email server but with a twist. As mentioned, we at Cloudinary leverage the one from SendGrid<\/a>, which accepts any email it receives and then parses it.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the process flow:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. A third party sends an email with an image attachment to the address you configured with your email provider.<\/li>\n
  2. For each email, SendGrid creates a webhook and sends it to a Cloudinary app that\u2019s deployed on Heroku.<\/li>\n
  3. The app parses the webhook and uploads the image to Cloudinary as an unsigned upload.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The Prerequisites<\/h2>\n

    Following are the requirements, starting with the final destination, Cloudinary:<\/p>\n

    Note:<\/strong> Some of the steps generate parameters for the next step. We\u2019ll work on eliminating that complexity.<\/p>\n