Image Management Questions

[phence]

I need some advise as to how I can add an 'image upload' feature to my site and MySQL database.

I do not know the proper way to store the images on my server nor in which table of my database.

I am going to be dealing with a lot images(thousands), so i need to make sure i do this the most efficient way.

Right now I have these tables: 'users', 'adds', 'images'.

For each result in the 'adds' table there is going to be an image.
The first question is how should I store these images on my server? Should I store them by user, having a directory for each user? Should I create a directory for each add? should i store the images alphabetically? Should I just throw them all in a single image directory? Or is there another wiser way?

The second question is how should i manage the images in within my MySQL tables and is there a need for an 'image' table depending on how the images are going to be stored on the server? What would be the fastest and most effeceint solution?

And i am open for any seggestions on how i ought to accomplish the method you would seggest. Thank-you!

[Tekime]

I store my images on disk, and record the image information in a table (tblImages).

I have a types table that I map image type to as well, but I don't know if you need that kind of functionality.

My favorite solution so far is to accept the upload, then generate a random 10 digit alphanumeric string for a filename. Then I check that the file doesn't already exist on disk, if it does, regenerate the filename.

Once the image with unique filename is stored to disk, create an entry in tblImages that has a unique ID, the filename on disk, image title, owner ID, category ID, etc. Depending on your implementation you can include whatever fields you need to associate the images table with other components in your project.

This way I can store all of my images in one directory, or have multiple directories with each dir dedicated to some module or application component that will always retrieve its images from that directory.

I don't like th eidea of saving images to the database, mostly for portability sake. Plus you can hotlink images on disk, but you need a script, permissions, anda query to pull an image from the database.

[phence]

Thanks alot Tekime!
Anyone else have any input or seggestions?

[phence]

i have decided after much thought to store my images in a database.

Would it be wiser to have a separate image database for each image, or to store the image in the 'adds' database along with the rest of the information?

Thank-you

[kpowning]

I would just store the image information in the database, not the image and then have the image reside on the server in a path such as /uploaded.. I think its alot cleaner to do it this way.

JUST MY $0.02