Hi Team,
a quick question on your image CDN (we’re not yet using your product).
You allow uploads from Dropbox and demo it with your file-uploader as a manual action. I assume one could also define a large Dropbox folder as a permanent Pull Zone, so that Uploadcare imports all new assets automatically to your servers. Is this correct? If this works – would your Importer also detect refreshed versions of files with identical file names?
A concrete scenario: Designer Lisa spots an ugly colour cast in an image that is already published on WordPress (via Uploadcare). She fires up Photoshop and performs the required corrections on the source-file. Then she overwrites the asset inside her local Dropbox folder, which is plugged into Uploadcare. Does the WordPress-published image refresh as well?
Thanks for reaching out! Unfortunately, it doesn’t work this way. There’s no permanent connection between a Dropbox folder and Uploadcare. Our app can only get access to a user’s file only when the user explicitly allows it to do so by clicking on the file in the UI. After that, our platform will pull the file and store a copy in the administrator’s project. This means if you make any changes to the source file, you’ll have to re-upload it to Uploadcare to get the new version.
After reading a bit more in your docs, I already figured that this likely is the case. What a bummer :o).
After looking into countless image processing / CDN services, I’m stunned that none of them has set up their pipeline in a way which allows remote controlled asset handling from Desktop machines. I can’t see major technical show-stoppers – still, nobody does this.
In Desktop publishing you can fill a whole book with hundreds of preliminary graphics and the photo editor can update the visual appearance of all assets without refreshing / or having to reupload anything. Next time the layout artist opens the book (in InDesign or similar DTP programs) the new look is perfectly in place.
Holger