Azure Image Gallery

An image gallery with file hosting on Azure Blob Storage

Demo

See a demo of the application at the following link: AzureImageGallery Currently offline to find a new hosting site.

Scope

This is a full stack application using C#/ASP.Net Core as an image gallery that uploads and reads files to an Azure blob storage container. Images have full create, edit, and delete functionality.

A SQL database reads an Uri to the actual file in the container of the storage service and serves it via web view, thus reducing space (and cost) needed in a relational database.

Project Structure

Azure-Image-Gallery is an N-tier project that contains three major project layers:

• The MVC web application contained in AzureImageGallery.Web.
• Database configuration, interfaces, and entities in the AzureImageGallery.Data.
• The business logic services layer to complete operations in the AzureImageGallery.Services directory.

Features

• Upload images or files and view them by date created.
• Search by title of an image.
• Paging.
• Authentication with Login/Register.

Setup and Download

In order to use this application:

• Download a zip file or clone the repository.

~$ git clone https://github.com/johnmcraig/azure-image-gallery

• Then, gather any missing NuGet packages and restore the project files using the DotNet command dotnet restore (or Build in Visual Studio).

• Afterwards, you will need to have an Azure account that has a Blob Storage service. Get the connection string from the account info under Access Keys, then pass them in the User Secrets or Application settings JSON file as: { "AzureStorageConnectionString": "YourActualKey" }.

  Additionally, if you do not have an appsettings.json file, you will need to create one.

• Make sure you use either Visual Studio Secret Manager or the dotnet command line to add the above JSON object (from point #3.) so the CloudStorage class and methods can connect using that string.

• Upon initial startup of the application, if it is currently in development mode, a Sqlite database will be created and a few images will be seeded into the database for testing purposes.

Technologies

• C#/ASP.NET Core MVC --version 3.1
• Sqlite3 Database for Development, SQL Server for product.
• Entity Framework Core as the ORM
• Azure Blob Storage
• HTML5, CSS3, and Bootstrap 4.3.1

The required NuGet Packages

• Microsoft.EntityFramework.Core
• Azure.Storage.Blobs v12+
• Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Design
• Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Sqlite

Future Features to be Implemented

• User Roles
• Admin Panel
• Able to edit tags