How to use firebase storage along with custom server?

Question

I am planning to use firebase storage as storage bucket for images for my app.

Shall I use client side firebase SDK to upload images directly to firebase or, shall I send image to my server first and use firebase Admin-sdk and let the server upload image to firebase? Also I have other data along with image which client will send, that server needs to handle.

EDIT: I was confused about one thing, if I use firebase admin-sdk, first my image need to upload to the server and then server will send it to firebase storage, won't it double the upload time?

Answer 1

Both are valid options, and neither is pertinently better than the other.

I typically prefer using the Firebase SDK to upload to Cloud Storage, since it saves me from having to come up with my own client-side code and handling things like network detection, retries, etc. I then often write metadata about the file to the Firebase database (either the Realtime Database, or Cloud Firestore) and use that to trigger Cloud Functions to do any backend processing that is needed on the image.

But it's equally valid to write your own server-side endpoint that does the processing of the image, and post to that from within your app.