How to Upload Multiple Images in Laravel

Image by positronx.io

A good number of websites require the user to upload multiple images of a product. This especially applies to e-commerce sites. Multiple images are used to provide a lot of details about the product on sale.

Implementing multiple image uploads has proven to be difficult for many developers. In this article, I will show you step by step how to upload multiple images using laravel.

Step 1: Create a new Laravel project using composer. You can give it any name but in this case, we will name it multipleImagesApp.

composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel muiltipleImagesApp

Step 2: In the multipleImageApp project create a migration to create a products table.

cd multipleImagesApp
php artisan make:migration create_products_table --create=products

Step 3: In the migration add the name and the description fields.

<?php
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;
class CreateProductsTable extends Migration
{
  public function up()
  {
    Schema::create('products', function (Blueprint $table) {
      $table->bigIncrements('id');
      $table->string('name');
      $table->string('description');  
      $table->timestamps();
  });
  }
public function down()
  {
    Schema::dropIfExists('products');
  }
}

Step 4: Create another migration that will create the images.

php artisan make:migration create_images_table --create=images

Step 5: In the migration add the fields url and product_id.

<?php
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;
class CreateImagesTable extends Migration
{
public function up(){
  Schema::create('images', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->bigIncrements('id');
    $table->string('url');
    $table->unsignedBigInteger('product_id');
    $table->timestamps();
});
}
public function down(){
   Schema::dropIfExists('images');
}}

Step 6: Next, create two models. One will be called Product and the other will be called Image.

php artisan make:model Product
php artisan make:model Image

Step 7: In the Product model add the title and content fields in the fillable array. Next, create a one-to-many relationship with the Image model.

<?php
namespace App;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
class Product extends Model
{
  protected $table = 'products';
  protected $fillable = [
      'name', 'discription'
  ];
  public function images()
  {
   return $this->hasMany('App\Image', 'product_id');
  }
}

Step 8: In the Image model add the url and the product_id fields in the fillable array. Next, create a one-to-many relationship with the Product model.

<?php
namespace App;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
class Image extends Model
{
  protected $table = 'images';
  protected $fillable = [
   'url', 'product_id'
  ];
public function product()
{
  return $this->belongsTo('App\Product', 'product_id');
}
}

Step 9: In the config/ folder, add a new disk called my_files in a file called filesystems.php.

'disks' => [
   'local' => [
      'driver' => 'local',
      'root' => storage_path('app'),
   ],
'public' => [
      'driver' => 'local',
      'root' => storage_path('app/public'),
      'url' => env('APP_URL').'/storage',
      'visibility' => 'public',
   ],
's3' => [
      'driver' => 's3',
      'key' => env('AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID'),
      'secret' => env('AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY'),
      'region' => env('AWS_DEFAULT_REGION'),
      'bucket' => env('AWS_BUCKET'),
      'url' => env('AWS_URL'),
   ],
'my_files' => [
      'driver' => 'local',
      'root'   => public_path() . '/'
   ]
],

Step 10: Next, create a controller and name it ProductController.

php artisan make:controller ProductController

Step 11: To the ProductController, add a function called uploadImages.

<?php
namespace App\Http\Controllers\Admin;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use App\Http\Controllers\Controller;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\DB;
use App\Product;
use Image;
use Storage;
class ProductController extends Controller
{
   public function addProduct(Request $request)
   {
      $this->validate($request, [
         'name' => 'required|string|max:255',
         'description' => 'required|string|max:855',
   ]);
   $product = new Product;
   $product->name = $request->name;
   $product->description = $request->description;
   $product->save();
   foreach ($request->file('images') as $imagefile) {
     $image = new Image;
     $path = $imagefile->store('/images/resource', ['disk' =>   'my_files']);
     $image->url = $path;
     $image->product_id = $product->id;
     $image->save();
   }}}

Step 12: Finally in the web.php file in the routes folder

<?phpuse Illuminate\Http\Request;
Route::post('addProduct', 'ProductController@addProduct')->name('products.uploadproduct');

Step 13: Create a file called uploadImages.blade.php.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
 <meta charset="utf-8">
 <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1,   shrink-to-fit=no">
<title>Multiple Image upload</title>
</head>
<body>
<div>
<h3>Upload a Images</h3>
<hr>
<form method="POST" action="{{ route('products.uploadproducts') }}" enctype="multipart/form-data" >
{{ csrf_field() }}
<div >
<label>Name</label>
<input type="text" name="name" placeholder="Enter Product Name">
<label>Discription</label>
<textarea name="description" rows="4" >
</textarea></div>
<div >
<label>Choose Images</label>
<input type="file"  name="images" multiple>
</div>
<hr>
<button type="submit" >Submit</button>
</form>
</div>
</body>
</html>

And there we have it. I hope you have found this useful. I will be back with more interesting articles. Thank you for reading.