time taken to upload a picture of 1M ~ 5M from iPhone to either Google AE or Amazon S3

Has anyone done some experiment on this? how about a 640 x 480 image? It'll be really bad user experience if it takes more then a couple seconds - as I am thinking about enabling user to take a photo and then upload it to either GAE or S3 from inside the iPhone app that I am providing.

By saying that, is there an end-2-end example out that to showcase the flow? either from iPhone App to S3 or from iPhone App to GAE.

So far I heard is that S3 is greate for storage, but at the same time there is no straightforward solution to solve the problem from end-2-end (iPhone to S3), is that true?

As my web service is hosted on GAE. The follow that I am thinking about is iPhone -> S3 with the pictures, then then iPhone->GAE with the ur开发者_开发技巧ls to the pictures. is that achievable? is there a better solution then that and could be achived in a short time?

There's not going to be any difference in the time taken to upload the picture to S3 or to App Engine. The amount of data to upload is the same in either case, and the bottleneck will be the user's internet connection.

If the image is larger than 1MB and you use App Engine, you'll need to use the Blobstore, which will add some complexity to the upload process. If you're concerned about upload time, though, you probably want to make the images smaller, rather than larger - and a 640x480 image certainly isn't going to exceed 1MB.

GAE has some pretty strict limits on response times and if you follow Nick's advice and keep the image less than 1MB, you should be fine.

Here are some docs on image manipulation in GAE(python): http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/images/usingimages.html http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/images/overview.html (a bit more comprehensive)

Blobstore is also pretty quick (I'm experimenting with Video right now), but for what you are describing, I'm not sure if there is a simpler solution.