General Use Case Question - iOS - Firebase and Images

[Doug Thompson]

Am not a developer and so appreciate your patience with what might seem like obvious questions. Mostly, our question is a general one - using Firebase on iOS with images - best practices, pros/cons, and do you lose the benefits of Firebase if you need to have a separate stream for image management if the images are stored in a CDN.

Use case: 

- Use your phone to follow a live stream of an event

- Stream includes text but is mostly focused on images

- Users will primarily access through an iOS device (iPhone) or Android phone

- Think of it like Firechat but with photos by users instead of just messages

Firebase has made it brilliantly simple and fast to set this up. But longer term, as we think about image storage:

- Does shifting from storing images 64bit inside FIrebase to an external CDN (e.g. Firebase hosting) degrade the synchronization process to any significant degree?

- Firebase on its own handles persistence but does storing images in a CDN negate the benefits of that persistence because you now need to separately manage persistence for the image store?

In other words, what's unclear is whether for iOS there are ways to take advantage of all of the benefits of FIrebase without losing them if the images are hosted separately. 

Firebase does a great job with persistence, synchronization and 'listening'/putting and getting records - our concern is that this might get lost on iOS because you end up building a separate in-app infrastructure for images and so end up with the equivalent of parallel systems when one would be preferred.

(We currently have a complex Core Data model which we had hoped might even be wiped out and replaced with Firebase! But the management of images worries us).

Again - I know this is a very general question and it isn't easy to give a solid response. 

But for anyone developing on iOS who has used Firebase for apps that include images, would be very curious to hear experiences. 

[Jacob Wenger]

Hey Doug,

Many of our developers use Firebase in combination with some other service to store images. The general technique which works best is to store the photo itself in a service like Google Cloud Storage and then store metadata about the photo (URL to the image, name, size, creator, etc.) in Firebase itself. That way, you get the benefits of Firebase's realtime sync while avoiding the unnecessary syncing of huge image data.

There is a recent Google Group post which links to some other Google Group posts with information about using Firebase + some other service to store images.

Jacob

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[Doug Thompson]

Thanks Jacob - and sorry for such a simple question!

Have run some great tests with SDImage and using our current server for storing images (we plan to migrate to Firebase hosting for static assets). Has been profound - blazing speed, persistence, really enjoying FIrebase.

Our development team did some basic tests with Firebase and the results have been night and day better than what came before.