 <p>If you end up going the route of uploading directly to S3 which offloads the work from your Rails server, please check out my sample projects:</p> <p>Sample project using Rails 3, Flash and MooTools-based FancyUploader to upload directly to S3: <a href="https://github.com/iwasrobbed/Rails3-S3-Uploader-FancyUploader" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/iwasrobbed/Rails3-S3-Uploader-FancyUploader</a></p> <p>Sample project using Rails 3, Flash/Silverlight/GoogleGears/BrowserPlus and jQuery-based Plupload to upload directly to S3: <a href="https://github.com/iwasrobbed/Rails3-S3-Uploader-Plupload" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/iwasrobbed/Rails3-S3-Uploader-Plupload</a></p> <p>By the way, you can do post-processing with Paperclip using something like this blog post describes:</p> <p><a href="http://www.railstoolkit.com/posts/fancyupload-amazon-s3-uploader-with-paperclip" rel="nofollow">http://www.railstoolkit.com/posts/fancyupload-amazon-s3-uploader-with-paperclip</a></p>