Geek question before bed: Images in databases

[Greg the dogsitter]

In this case, MySQL.

Store the images in the database, or just store references to their locations?

[Seacrest]

References. That is generally the way to go.

[StingMe]

Ditto.

[mattkime]

Ditto ditto

[TheCaber]

Ditto ditto ditto.



Oh, and what they said above. References.
Most databases do an incredibly poor job of storing and retrieving variably-sized entities of any type, let alone binary large objects (BLOBs) like images, audio or video.

Those that do a decent job store/use references to specify where the object data can be found. The references are of a known size and can be allocated/sorted/stored easily.

The downside is that the data object can be (re)moved without the reference being removed or updated.

TANSTAAFL