example-s3-photo-gallery

S3 Photo Gallery

A 60-line Node.js script that uploads a folder of images to local S3 and generates a static HTML gallery from them.

What it shows

• Creating a bucket and uploading objects with the AWS SDK v3
• Listing bucket contents and building presigned URLs
• That you don't need a "real" cloud to prototype a photo-sharing flow

Stack

• Node.js 20+
• @aws-sdk/client-s3, @aws-sdk/s3-request-presigner
• Floci S3

Run it

Make sure Floci is running:

docker run -d --name floci -p 4566:4566 \
  -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
  floci/floci:latest

Install deps and run:

npm install
node gallery.js ./photos

Open gallery.html in your browser. The images load directly from local S3 via presigned URLs.

How it works

The script does three things:

1. Creates a bucket called photo-gallery (no-op if it already exists).
2. Uploads every file in the directory you pass as an argument.
3. Generates gallery.html with <img> tags pointing at presigned URLs that expire in an hour.

The interesting bit is the endpoint override:

const s3 = new S3Client({
  endpoint: "http://localhost:4566",
  region: "us-east-1",
  credentials: { accessKeyId: "test", secretAccessKey: "test" },
  forcePathStyle: true,
});

That's the entire difference between this script and one that targets real AWS. Drop the endpoint line and it works against your real account.

Try changing...

• Swap forcePathStyle: true for virtual-hosted-style with localhost.floci.io and see what changes.
• Add a --public flag that sets the bucket ACL to public-read and drops the presigning.
• Generate thumbnails with sharp before upload, store originals and thumbs under different prefixes.

Author

[your-handle-here] — replace this when you submit a real lab.