Adding an Image Field

[dynamiteRW]

I got one more question.

Say I wanted to add an image...what is the field classified as?

TINYINT
SMALLINT
MEDIUMINT
INT
BIGINT
FLOAT
DOUBLE
DECIMAL
DATE
DATETIME
TIMESTAMP
TIME
YEAR
CHAR
VARCHAR
TINYBLOB
TINYTEXT
TEXT
BLOB
MEDIUMBLOB
MEDIUMTEXT
LONGBLOB
LONGTEXT
ENUM
SET

[matt_4013]

either text or blob. The only difference between them is the way they're sorted when selecting a large result set 🙂

[Mordecai]

LONGBLOB or LONGTEXT. If you know they'll be small images, you can use BLOB or TEXT. (BLOB seems to be more universal for image storing, however.)

I believe MySQL warns against storing images in the database, though...

[Sphynx]

The biggest drawback I've seen with storing images in a DB is that the image is never cached in the visitor's browser. To them, it's a new image, and a full new request for that image every single time. So where normally a cached image can be displayed without actually transferring the bytes on every request, an image sourced from a query will need to download fully every single time.

This has the effect of sucking bandwidth like there's no tomorrow! :p

Hey if anyone has any magic that can alleviate this issue, please lemme know, eh?

[Norman_Graham]

I would agree that storing images in a database on the web is not a great idea. Dump images in a folder and store the path in the database, then the image will be cached on load.

Norman