sofiamatulis / pixlee-instagram

##Pixlee- Instagram

This is a simple web app to showcase Instagram's pictures. The user can search through photos by tag and date.The user can also make an account and create a gallery where the photos can be saved.

Gems that were used:

• 1. Instagram: The Instagram gem is a ruby API gem that helps and simplifies the process to pull Instagram photos into the web app.
• 2. React-rails: React-rails makes it simpler to user React and JSX in the application
• 3. Figaro: Figaro makes it easier to configure the application in a secure method.

Instagram API docs:
https://www.instagram.com/developer/endpoints/tags/

Heroku link:
https://stark-dawn-58719.herokuapp.com

• What was done for Back-end: In terms of back-end, I created a rails app (MVC model). When it comes to models, I created a User model (the user can make an account), a Gallery model(a user can create a gallery), and a photo model (where information from the photos pulled from Instagram's API are saved so the user can save it to the gallery as well). Finally, in terms of the controller: in the photos controller, there are the functions to add photos to your gallery and the index of all the photos, in the users controller there is the option to create a new account, in the sessions controller, there is the option to log in and log out and in the galleries controller, it is possible to make new galleries and view them. I chose Postgres instead of the default sqlite3 since I was going to deploy the app to Heroku.

• What was done for Front-end: In terms of front-end, I used React to showcase the gallery's show page with the images that were added, javascript to enable the user to save a photo in a gallery with an AJAX request. And a drop down menu in the main page to make it more user friendly. CSS was used to make the page look nicer and only some views are rendered if the user is logged in, if he is logged out only the search function is available. In terms of views, views for log in/sign up, create a gallery, view a gallery/all galleries, view all photos, search photos, add photos to the gallery, were made to make the user experience friendly and simple.

Features that were added:

• Search through Instagram's photos by hashtag and date

• A user is able to create an account and login

• A user is able to create a gallery

• A user is able to save photos into the gallery

What I would improve:

• More in depth search function

• A better interface for the user

Documentation: