Status Notification Topic: Real-Time Photo Status Notifications

The Status Notification Topic is an integration option that lets your organization receive real-time notifications whenever a photo submission's status changes in RemotePhoto, such as when a photo is submitted, approved, denied, downloaded, etc.

RemotePhoto creates an AWS SNS (Simple Notification Service) topic named Status Notification Topic for your organization. You then subscribe to an endpoint to that topic, and as status events occur, RemotePhoto publishes a message to the topic, which SNS automatically pushes out to every subscribed endpoint.

How It Works (Video Walkthrough)

1. We create the SNS topic in RemotePhoto under organization > Download Settings > Status Notification Topic
   1. Choose a name indicating the integration you are setting up.
   2. Choose the status you want the notification to fire a message
2. You subscribe to an endpoint to the topic. This is most commonly an HTTPS endpoint on your side, though SNS also supports subscribing to the following
   1. HTTPS
   2. HTTP
   3. Email
   4. Email JSON
   5. SQS
   6. Application
   7. Lambda
3. You confirm the subscription. This sends a confirmation message to your endpoint, which it must acknowledge.
4. From that point on, whenever a relevant photo status event occurs, RemotePhoto publishes a message to the topic, and SNS delivers it directly to your endpoint. This setup contains no polling on your end.

Why SNS

SNS is push-based and supports fan-out: if you have multiple systems that each need to react to the same status update (say, a student/employee records system and an internal reporting tool), you can create multiple topics for one photo status and each receives its own copy of every message. It's a good fit when you want status changes delivered to you immediately rather than pulling for them on a schedule.

The trade-off is that your endpoint must be available and responsive when a message is sent. If it's down, the delivery can fail, and the message is lost.

A Note on the Alternative: Status Queue

For partners who'd rather control the pace at which messages are processed, or who want messages to persist safely until they're ready to consume them, we also support a Status Queue option. This is where RemotePhoto sends status events to an SQS queue in your AWS account. The event data is the same either way; the difference is pull vs. push delivery. If you're not sure which model fits your architecture, we're happy to help you decide.

What is a Status Queue?