Hi Wade, Regarding storing images as files or in a BLOB...
...I definitely would store them as files. Performance may be a bit better as blobs than when storing them in files (although that depends, if you have to make thumbnails 'on the fly' it may be slower again than just retrieving a stored thumbnail), but if you store them as BLOBS in your database, the size of the database may quickly run out of hand. And in the first place make regularly backing up of your database content inviable. Whereas keeping them as files keeps the DB small enaling regular backing up. Regarding Gurudattas answer... > I seriously doubt if image from stored in DB will be faster, > since u will have to > > 1) search it in Db A search will have to be done in the DB anyway, just to come up with the filename for instance... > 2) retrieve it from Db in memory Memory access is generally faster than disk acces, which is why a blob generally is considered advantageous. > 3) Save it by creating a new file Just like you don't need let PHP save an HTML file first to have the user access it, it is not needed to save the image first. The image can be sent 'on the fly', just like a PHP generated HTML page is sent. > 4) Create code to send this file to user You will have to create that code (well, just a formatted <IMG SRC="..."> tag) anyway to make the browser understand there is an image to be displayed. > 5) U will have to do this for each user every time Yep, same with an image read from file. > 6) Hence it wont be in users cache Hmmm, why wouldn't it be cached? PH generated documets get caced as well, why wouldn't an image be cached? To the browser it doesn't matter to much from where the 1's and 0's were pulled that make the image. As far as I understood it is better, performance wise, to store images in a DB (although I wonder if that still holds if you routinely have to generate thumbnails on the fly) but for general manageability of a site, especially when large numbers of images are required, storing them as files keeps things more organised. I always store images as files, with a name derived from the tablename, underscore, value of the primary key, underscore, number of the field containing the filename (that way avoiding naming conflicts is a row contains more than one fieldcontaining a filename). But well, every solutin always has pros and cons, generally there is more than one 'right' way to solve a problem. How 'right' a solution is depends on the weight one gives to each argument. Marc
