Thumbnail with Database

[please_explain]

Hi,
I am making an Auto Dealer website. The dealer wants to post data about each vechicle along with a thumbnail image and larger image. The dealer will have a few hundred vehicles to sell at any one time.

My intension.... was to create a separate folder on the websever for thumbnails and a separate folder for the larger images. Then in the mySQL database table, I will store only the file name of the thumbnail and the filename of the larger image.

Is this a good approach?

Has anyone actually tried to store the images as a blob? or is that more overhead?

What's the best practice for naming the image files? tn8765.jpg? I was going to have the process for entering a vehicle like a wizard. I was going to have the administrator enter the vehicle data first and use the vehicle ID from the database for the filename (as shown above) - this way, they match, and they're unique, and the user doesn't need to think.

Are there any good ariticles or books on databases with products using images?

THANKS!!! For some feedback here!!

[jweissig]

hello,

i have done something like this for a rental listings website.. i had much the same problem..

here is what i did...

Add property wizard
- upload and image (full size)
- script resizes full image to the "full image" size for the website.. this resize takes place for that all images on the website look the same size.
- create a thumbnail of the resizes image
- insert image and thumbnail file paths into database

I renamed all images to a MD5 hash so that no names would have the same name and just makes it easy. I created the following folder structure.. "/images/YYYYDDMM/md5.jpg"...

You can store the image data in the database but it is faster and simpler to store it on the filesystem.

hope this helps.
- justin