have Rshiny app user upload image to dropbox /shiny server / google drive - r

Question

I am almost done creating a survey using Rshiny. I want to create a button that will allow the user to upload an image (jpeg,tiff,png etc) to the R shiny server, Dropbox, or google drive. It seems the fileInput method only accepts documents like csv? any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

fileInput actually allows the import of any type of files. You just need to set the argument accept to NULL or to any file extension that you accept. What you need to understand first, is that if you use fileInput, it will actually upload your file to the tmp folder (the path to the uploaded data is stored in input$file$datapath), and only then you will be able to upload your file to googledrive or to whatever cloud. A solution using fileInput could look like this:
library(googledrive)
ui <- fluidPage(
fileInput(inputId = "file",
label = "Choose file to upload",
accept = NULL)
)
server <- function(input, output) {
observeEvent(input$file, {
drive_upload(media = input$file$datapath,
name = input$file$name)
})
}
shinyApp(ui, server)
If the "double upload" is a problem for you, you can avoid this by using the package shinyFiles. A nice answer has been posted here and here's a way to adapt the code to address your specific problem.
library(googledrive)
library(shinyFiles)
ui <- fluidPage(
shinyFilesButton("Btn_GetFile", "Choose file to upload" ,
title = "Please select a file:", multiple = FALSE,
buttonType = "default", class = NULL)
)
server <- function(input, output, session) {
volumes = getVolumes()
observe({
shinyFileChoose(input, "Btn_GetFile", roots = volumes, session = session)
if (!is.null(input$Btn_GetFile)){
file_selected <- parseFilePaths(volumes, input$Btn_GetFile)
drive_upload(media = as.character(file_selected$datapath),
name = as.character(file_selected$name))
}
})
}
shinyApp(ui = ui, server = server)